Framework of community based Fall Prevention Program

RUNNING HEAD: QUALITY PRACTICE STRATEGIES
QUALITY PRACTICE STRATEGIES
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QUALITY PRACTICE STRATEGIES1
Framework of community based Fall Prevention Program
According to Australia Commission for Safety and Quality, the following
quality improvement (QI) procedure should be followed by nurses and other health
professional while working within the framework of a fall prevention program in a
community based residential care.
1).Establish a culture of quality in your practice. The organization’s processes and
procedures must be integrated with the QI efforts (Sibthorpe et al. 2018). Behaviors (Ader et
al. 2019) attitudes and actions sums up the organization’s culture (Williams, Perillo and
Brown 2015) and reflect how very passionately the team embrace and deliver quality. Quality
improvement culture is unique for different practice. Hence, establishing different QI teams,
regular meetings, creating QI policies are important.
2).Determine and prioritize potential areas for improvement. Identification of the patient
population, identifying the barriers to community care, the prevalent conditions, high-risk
patients, and identifying the community based operational issues and missed areas like low
morale, poor communication, long queuing.
3).Collect and analyze data. Data collection, data analysis is the heart of quality
improvement. The data helps in identifying the priority areas, risk areas and the potential
areas where improvement can be done, setting of measurable goals, monitoring the
effectiveness of practice change.
4).Communicate the clinical and intervention results. The staff, patients and physicians
should be aware of how community program is going and how the results are coming up.
The patients should be involved when planning, implementing the quality improvement areas

QUALITY PRACTICE STRATEGIES2
in nursing and then communicated with the intervention needs, nursing actions (de Moura Sá
et al. 2017) and healthcare priorities.
5).Committing to ongoing evaluation - Quality improvement process is an ongoing
intervention. A pragmatic, well devised practice strives to enhance performance,
effectiveness of the interventions and consider staff, patient feedback.
6).Spread the successes - Sharing knowledge and sharing experiences broadly with other
groups and communities benefit healthcare industry wholly.
FALL RATES AND IMPACT
Injuries that require hospitalization has been seen to increase with a certain age that is
at beginning of 65 years (on an average) and the ‘falls’ are cardinal reasons of injuries. In
every year, about thirty percent of the Australians more than 65 years of age fall and ten
percent of these geriatric falls leads to an injury (Latt et al. 2017). Reasons can also be
cognitive impairment, incontinence that lead to falls and consequent injuries. The proportion
of these falls causes overnight admissions to be around 80% of the total overnight
admissions. Any increase in the falling rates may attribute to a person getting older – muscle
strength, decreased muscle tone and decreased fitness due to physical inactivity. The
medications may also contribute to increased falling risks (Ruxton et al. 2015). Alcohol
consumption (Shah et al. 2018) is strongly related to falls, particularly if alcohol interferes
with the medications.
Impaired vision (Wilson et al. 2018) is another huge contributing factor to these fall
incidents. In residential aged care facilities – the fall - injury rates varies from condition to
condition and progression of the condition as well. The fall ratio is different for the mobile
old people with the dementia (Bamford et al. 2018) comparatively to the dependent people
and bed ridden patients. Hence neurological observation assessment is an important nursing