Reducing High Fall Risk Medications that May Lead to Falls

Abstract

Falls have easily become a growing problem for acute care institutions. Finding a way to reduce the number of falls has become a mystery as many falls are multi-factorial. In order to address this ongoing problem, this study focused on the ordering of medications upon a patient’s admission to an acute care facility. A retrospective chart review was completed on the past 30 falls at the Queen’s Medical Center. An average of 2.9 high risk medications were found per patient. A pre-test/post-test of an educational intervention was then performed with 10 providers. The intervention gave further education on common high-risk medications. After about 1 week, the next 30 total admissions were reviewed to see how many high-risk medications were ordered. An average of 2.4 high risk medications were found per patient post educational intervention. A paired t-test was used to find the significance between the two variables: Variable A) high fall risk medication prior to admission, and Variable B) high fall risk medications ordered after reading educational handout. Using SPSS, the critical value was found to be 3.396 with alpha at .05 and df = 29. The t-test value was 1.785, which was < 3.396 and the p-value was .085. With the p-value being > 0.05, the two means are not statistically significant. The t-test value is also smaller than the critical value, concluding that the t-statistic of 1.785 is not statistically significant. With these values, it can be concluded that the number of medications ordered were not significantly different after going through the educational session with the handout.