To Reduce Patient Fall Cases, Essay Example

According to the agency for the health care research and quality (AHCRQ), close to one million cases of fall are reported in U.S. hospitals every year. Considering the fact that fall are associated with increased morbidity, mortality rate, and impact on reimbursement rate, preventing fall is a top priority. This is because controlling cases of fall will improve the patient safety, their family’s satisfaction, quality of the care as well as cost reduction.

The mission of this initiative is to provide safe, high quality and culturally sensitive care, to patient and their families, within the health system environment. This will be achieved by developing a system to reduce or prevent cases of fall of patients who are at high- risk environments with the goal of improving the quality of life. In this regard, this quality improvement initiative will take place in acute care medicine (ACM), which has a fall rate of 2.93 /1000 patient day. This rate is above the recommended benchmark in similar teaching facilities. Thus, it is important to improve this rate to not only match the benchmark but also surpass it.

This initiative will use a simple quality improvement model known as plan-do-study- act (PDSA). PDSA model will help the team to test changes in the real work setting and then refine the changes though several PDSA cycles. The change idea will be generated from creative thinking, or borrowing from experience of others. The change will first be tested on the chosen unit in small scale, if successful; it will then be implemented on other organizational units. If change fails, the cycle will begins again.