NURS2006 Clinical Practice Improvement: Fall Prevention Project

This report presents a clinical practice improvement project aimed at reducing falls in a geriatric ward by 20% within 12 months. It emphasizes the relevance of clinical governance, particularly patient safety and quality improvement, and highlights the significance of addressing fall-related injuries in the aging Australian population, supported by statistical data. Key stakeholders include patients, families, nurses, healthcare providers, and management. The project employs the PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) cycle to assess patient experience and implement evidence-based interventions such as exercise, multifactorial assessments, vitamin D administration, and educational management. The report also acknowledges barriers to implementation, including patient denial, lack of healthcare provider knowledge, communication gaps, and funding limitations. The project's evaluation involves statistical analysis of collected data, including questionnaire validation using Cronbach's alpha.

NURS2006 ASSIGNMENT 5
Clinical Practice Improvement Project Report
Student Name, FAN and ID:
Type your assignment into the white spaces in the template and the rows will expand as much as
you need them
Project Title:
Fall prevention in geriatric ward
Project Aim:
To achieve 20% reduction in the rate of falls by 12 months
Relevance of Clinical Governance to your project
Clinical governance refers to a framework by which UK National Health Services (NHS) authorities
are accountable for the improvement of the quality of the health care services they are providing. It
is one of the key agenda of the UK central government for ensuring the quality care in health care
sectors (Swift and Iliffe, 2014). In Australia, clinical governance is also a major issue and it depicts a
relationship between the patients and the health care provider. Along with this, state or territory
health department, the governing body are also involved. According to the standards of National
safety and Quality Health Service Standards( NSQHS), the main components of the clinical
governance are (Spigelman and Rendalls., 2015) -
1) Governance, leadership and culture
2) Clinical performance and effectiveness
3) Patient safety and quality improvement system
4) Partnering with consumers

5) Safe environment for delivery of care.
In this project, the patient safety and quality improvement system and safe environment for
delivering care are mostly important, as the project is associated with the prevention of fall in
geriatric ward. The risk of fall and fall related injury is very common in the geriatric ward of
hospitals. To reduce the risk of fall and fall related injury, nurses should take relevant role in
maintaining the safety of patients and safe medical environment and those are key components
of clinical governance. For the nurses, it is very important to have proper knowledge of those
components. Unless, they are unable to give proper care to the patients.
Evidence that the issue / problem is worth solving:
The enhancement of Australian aged population has increased the risk of fall, fall related injury, and
every year the older age population is growing in numbers. Since 2017, about 3.8 million people of
Australians having the age of 65 and over which covers about 15 % of total population of Australia. It
is predicted that, the growing older age population will reach to 8.8 million by 2057 (Australian
Institute of Health and Welfare, 2018). With rising older population, the case of fall related injury in
Australia is also increased. According to a report of Australian Government named ‘Trends in
hospitalization injury due to falls in older people’ stated the trend of fall related injury cases of older
age population in the time of 2002-03 to 2014-15. According to that report, almost 111,222 patients
with the age of 65 or over has been hospitalized due to fall in 2014-15 and it is about 3% of total
hospitalization case of adult population (age 65 or over). In this case scenario, it is seen that women
were more prone to fall injury than the men. The rate of women fall related injury was 3519 per
100,000 and the rate of men fall injury was 2412 per 100,000 population. The age related injury
hospitalization has been increased over the period of time 2002-03 to 2014-15. The rate of increase
hospitalization is 3% for the men and it was 2% for the women. The fall related injury in 2014-15 is
commonly associated with the head injury (24%) and hip and thigh injury (24%). Although the rate

of head injury was higher in older the population of Australia. The hip fracture was the most
common injuries and it is almost 73%. Almost two folds increased the rate of head injury over the
time of 2001-03 to 2014-15. In 2002-03 the head injury cases was about 319 and 336 per 100,000
population for men and women respectively. However, in 2014-15 the numbers increased to 706
and 731 for men and women respectively. The most frequent cause of fall injury in Australia was fall
on a level from stumbling, slipping and tripping (34%). The percentage was about 15% in case of
falling from the household objects as chairs ladder, stairs, beds. Almost, 85% of the fall injury cases
in 2014-15 was occurred in home or in residential care unit. The rate of falling in the home was
about 1814 per 100,000 population and the rate was 10,090 per 100,000 in case of residential aged
care (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2018). Although, there was 17 % case scenario, in
which place of occurrence was not specified (Voula ,Shannon and Janneke, 2015). The fall related
injury also affect the family member and as well as other care giver of the patients. The Australian
Commission on safety and Quality in Health Care had introduced various measures to prevent such
fall related injuries. It can be said that, with proper implementation of various plans, the problem of
fall related injury could be solved in some extent.
Key Stakeholders:
The stakeholders play a crucial role in preventing the fall in the geriatric unit of the hospital. In this
case, the primary stakeholders are the older age patients, the family and other care giver of the
patients, nurses and other health care provider and as well as the health care management team.
The nurses are the primary factor in the implementation of interventions of fall reducing measures
as they are directly involved in providing the care. The main of this of this project is to reduce the
rate of fall related in injury in older age people. To implement the interventions, patient education is
very much required and the nurses can play crucial role in educating the people and promote the
person cantered care to raise the involvement of patients in this awareness programme
(Chamberlain-Salaun , Mills and Usher., 2013).

CPI Tool:
CPI Tool refers to the methodology that supplies a framework for the health care providers for
improving the quality of services they are currently providing. There are many tools for improving
the quality of services. A PDSA tool is very much effective for this project. The Plan-Do-Study-Act
(PDSA) cycle is a crucial part of the health care unit for improving the quality of the services. The
main steps of PDSA cycles are (Toussaint and Berry, 2013)-
1) Step 1 is the planning of the observation or the test.
2) Step 2 is the implementation of the tests on a small scale range
3) Step 3 is the study of data that is analysing the data and the study result.
4) Step 4 is the act that is implementation of changes detected by the test.
The main purpose of using this tool in this case is to build up a relationship between the
changing process and related outcomes. The PDSA tool helps in finding the project goal, the
outcomes of the changes, and the method of attaining those changes in the health sector. In the
first step, planning is required for the problems, which are already reported. In this step,
innovative ideas are important to address the reported problems. In 2nd step, the suggested
changes are implemented and the consequences are recorded. However, if there is any
unwanted situations, that also must be recorded. In the next step, the existing literature related
to the topic should be reviewed and relation should be established with the test result to
support the result of the test. Moreover, the similarity of the project interventions with the
literature studies will strongly increase the reliability of the test interventions. In the last step,
the small-scale test result are applied to the large scale if the small-scale test results are able to
meet the aim of the project. In this project, the PDSA is used to assess the patient experience
and based on that interventions are planned to reduce the risk of fall injury ( Spencer and
Campbell, 2014).

Summary of proposed interventions:
In this project, firstly, the fall rate in the geriatric unit is examined and the causative factors of the
fall injury is assessed. In this project, the assessment group was the older population in the age
group of 65 or above. Exercise intervention can be good choice for reducing the risk of fall injury. In a
study, it is seen that exercise intervention for a time of 12 months with a frequency of 3-exercise
session per week showed effective result in fall prevention. Multifactorial intervention is another
effective way in which the initial geriatric assessment is performed and that comprises of any
number of the following components like vision, gait, balance, cardiovascular health, cognition,
medication, psychological health. The pre and post assessment tests are conducted by physical tests.
Administration of vitamin D also showed improvement in fall related injuries (Janelle et al., 2018).
Fabienne et al.(2013) showed that fall prevention exercise programmes for the elderly has reduced
the rate of fall and as well as also is responsible for lowering the fall injury. The reduction rate is 37%
for all type of injurious fall, 43% for the severe injuries due to fall and lastly the 61% fall is
responsible for fracture. In a study by Hill et al. (2013) showed that, educational management is an
effective way of preventing fall in the elderly people in the hospital. In this project, initially, the
nurses knowledge about fall prevention will be assessed and there role in patient education related
to fall prevention is also examined. After that, the nurses would participate in a discussion of fall
prevention strategies of the hospital. Next, intervention plan will be made up from the information
that has come out from the discussion. In that study, data was collected from the 48 participants
who were at the age group of 65 or above. Among them, 23 people reported about fall and 18 case
was from the control group and five from the experimental group. The fall rate in the intervention
group was 5.4 falls/ 1000 patient and in the control group, it was 18.7/ 1000 patients. This showed
that, patient education could reduce the fall rate in elderly.
Barriers to implementation and sustaining change:
Although, the interventions of this project were evidence-based, there are several hindrances to

implement those interventions. The health care providers ( HCP) faces various problems like denial
that is the elderly people disagreed to accept that they had fall due to the balance, muscle weakness
and gait balance and along with this they were also not ready to accept their certain behaviour that
can cause fall of them. In some cases, the health care providers had not enough knowledge to assess
the fall and they are unable to understand the value of exercise in fall management. In some cases,
the hearing problems for the older age people. As a result, they were underdiagnosed by the HCP.
The vision problem was also another major barrier for implementing the interventions. The lack of
communication between the HCPs causes lack in exchanging information and as a result, there was
no proper discussion about the case study of the older people. As a result, the injured people are not
sent to the other specialists like physiotherapists, occupational therapists and this ultimately results
in hamper of treatment. The lack of follow up treatment in fall injury is another major hindrances
and discontinuity in treatment ultimately hampers the medication procedures. Lack of proper
education in managing the fall injury is another big problem in implementing the interventions
(Loganathan et al., 2015). The negligence from the patient’s end is also a major hindrance in
implementing the interventions. Lack of proper funding for the interventions is also decreases the
chances of implementation (Gleeson et al., 2014).
Evaluation of the project:
The information collected from this project would be analysed by the various statistical tools. The
questionnaires to assess the condition of the fall injury of the elder people would be validated by the
Cronbach alpha test to examine the reliability of the questionnaire. To assess the environment of the
health care sector, checklist would be used and the checklist should be assessed by reliability test
tool. The pre intervention data was collected and stored for future analysis. After that, proposed
intervention are implemented and changes were again recorded for comparing with the previous
result. The comparison of the pre and after data analysis would ultimately enhance the reliability of
the project. In this project, it would be recorded that the implementation of the interventions will
enhance the patient safety and reduce the fall related injury in the elderly population.

NURS2006 Assignment 3 - CPI paper Marking Rubric

References
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare(2018).Trends in hospitalised injury due to falls in older
people 2002–03 to 2014–15. Injury Research and Statistics Series Number 111.
Chamberlain-Salaun, J., Mills, J. and Usher, K., 2013. Terminology used to describe health care
teams: an integrative review of the literature. Journal of multidisciplinary healthcare, 6, p.65.
El-Khoury, F., Cassou, B., Charles, M.A. and Dargent-Molina, P., 2013. The effect of fall prevention
exercise programmes on fall induced injuries in community dwelling older adults: systematic review
and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. BMj, 347, p.f6234.
Gleeson, M, Sherrington, C and Keay, L 2014,’ Improving Balance and Mobility in people over 50
years of age with vision impairments: can the Alexander technique help? A study protocol for the
visibility randomised controlled trial’, Pubmed, vol 20.
Hill, A.M., Etherton-Beer, C. and Haines, T.P., 2013. Tailored education for older patients to facilitate
engagement in falls prevention strategies after hospital discharge—a pilot randomized controlled
trial. PloS one, 8(5), p.e63450.
Janelle M., Guirguis-B., Yvonne L. M., Leslie A. P., Erin L. C and Tracy L.B.,2018. Interventions to
Prevent Falls in Older Adults Updated Evidence Report and Systematic Review for the US Preventive
Services Task Force. JAMA. 2018;319(16):1705-1716. US Preventive Services Task Force
Loganathan, A., Ng, C.J., Tan, M.P. and Low, W.Y., 2015. Barriers faced by healthcare professionals
when managing falls in older people in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: a qualitative study. BMJ open, 5(11),
p.e008460.
Spencer, R. and Campbell, S.M., 2014. Tools for primary care patient safety: a narrative review. BMC
family practice, 15(1), p.166.
Spigelman, A.D. and Rendalls, S., 2015. Clinical governance in Australia. Clinical Governance: an
International Journal, 20(2), pp.56-73.
Swift, C.G. and Iliffe, S., 2014. Assessment and prevention of falls in older people–concise
guidance. Clinical medicine, 14(6), pp.658-662.
Toussaint, J.S. and Berry, L.L., 2013, January. The promise of Lean in health care. In Mayo clinic
proceedings (Vol. 88, No. 1, pp. 74-82). Elsevier.
Voula S., Shannon G. and Janneke B-G., 2015.Fall-related injury profile for Victorians aged 65 years
and older. Victorian Injury Surveillance Unit (VISU). (Edition No. 80).