says a lot of the falls they've seen have been young, healthy people
who were simply affected by the medications they were on. "We
explain that you feel like you're awake, but the rest of you might not
be completely awake yet," says Mr. Ham.
4
Follow up regularly with staff
to standardize your practices.
"Standardization is important," says Ms. Morris. Follow up con-
tinuously with your staff to make sure everyone is using the same pro-
tocols to prevent patient falls. "We had issues with Get Up and Go,"
says. Ms. Morris. "We had it in place and thought everyone was doing
it, but everyone interpreted themselves how to do it." She says that
some nurses were having patients walk 50 feet to the bathroom as an
assessment, which put them at risk of falling when no one was close
enough to help. Others were having patients walk 2 feet to their
belongings, which wasn't a strong enough assessment. The idea is to
perform a limited gait assessment — a 10-foot walk, up and back —
without endangering the patient.
If the worst-case scenario does happen, use that case study to edu-
cate your staff and explore why it happened and how it could've been
prevented as a team. "It's a good learning tool to see something that
really occurred and apply standardization to it," says Ms. Mouradjian.
Ounce of prevention
Although patient falls might be rare, your OR team is the last line of
defense in preventing them. By taking the time to assess your patient
and working in extra steps to keep riskier patients from falling, you
could avoid a slippery situation — and maybe slash your own patient
falls by half.
OSM
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