This project aims to desalinate information that will help to reduce falls in the acute care setting by setting forth and implementing color-coded socks as well as stars outside the rooms. This is to inform the staff of who is a fall risk and allow them to take measures to ensure these clients are safe. At the start, of this project, I feel like Jessie Young, Lily Wolff, and I struggled to come up with a topic. This was due to the fact that there are so many topics and issues that can be addressed. That being said, after some group decision and really looking at the issue on our clinical floor. When doing this, we found that a lot of the patient’s charts stated that they were fall risks. This was expected since it’s a Med/Surg floor and a lot of post-op patients are fall risks. Despite this fact, there was no real indication of who was a fall risk on the floor other than what could be read in the chart. This got us thinking about ways to improve this issue and thus our project idea came to fruition. We became doing research on the prevalence of falls in the acute care setting as well as measures that can be taken to reduce these fall risks. There was so much available research on fall prevention that we were able to find and pull from and no information and methods to prevent fall that I had never learned before. With this information that was found, we plan on educating the staff on ways to implement using measures that are already in place at the hospital as well as new measures to reduce falls. Falls in the hospital setting can lead to additional complications as well as extend a patient’s stay within the hospital. I learned that on average this stay increases to 6.3 additional days. This is why it is so important for the safety of our patients that we prevent falls in all the ways we can. After starting work on this project, the three of us found that we work rather well together. We formed a group chat over text as well as a shared Google Docs folder that allowed for us to work together and bounce ideas and question off one another. We were also able to divide the literature review up and find articles that we found informative and share it will one another as well as make edits and changes to things that needed to be improved upon. All the work has been equally shared and everyone has been respectful and helpful in helping gather and formulate our information. Overall I have had a great experience working with this group and think our teamwork will continue throughout the rest of the project.
