Outpatient Surgery Magazine - Subscribers

OR Excellence Awards - Outpatient Surgery Magazine - September 2018

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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"What's going on?" "Well, I've been falling a lot lately," said the patient. That got the nurse to thinking. The hospi- tal didn't have a sys- tem in place to flag patients who were at high risk of falling. Soon thereafter, lead- ership started looking at the falls occurring in the hospital and discovered that there were 7 falls in 2017. "Everybody started talking about why we were having so many falls. What was going on?" says Karen Acosta, MSN, RN, CNOR, director of surgical services at Houston Physicians' Hospital, the winner of the 2018 OR Excellence Award for Patient Safety. Always concerned about patient safety, the hospital implemented a "Patient Fall Initiative" to identify those patients at risk of falling and developed a system to let all staff along the patient's journey know they were dealing with a patient who was likely to fall. Here's how it works. They screen all patients in pre-op to identify those at a higher risk of falls. They fit those patients designated as high risk with yellow wristbands and yellow slip-resistant socks so any member of the perioperative team can easily identify them. "We needed a good visualization in all departments, so that anybody walking by to see that patient would know that they were at high risk of falling," says Ms. Acosta. "You can see the patient's feet in the pre- 3 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 • COUNT ON IT Valeska Coleman, RN, CST, stands next to a custom color board that provides a visual reference for all members in the procedure and operating rooms. Houston Physicians' Hospital

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