"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