Fall Prevention - Minimizing Alarm Response Time Presentation

Dissemination of Evidence

 

My BSN Senior Seminar Capstone Project, Utilizing Door Stops to Enhance Fall Prevention and Alarm Response in Healthcare, analyzed a simple, cost-effective approach to addressing hospital falls. The CDC estimates that patient falls cost $50 billion annually for healthcare facilities (2024). Interventions such as intuitive wearable devices have undergone thorough research for the efficacy in the prevention of falls and are starting to be utilized in some facilities, however, healthcare in rural areas particularly are unable to provide the funding to implement this measure currently. My objective was to look at fall prevention from a low-budget, and ease-of-use standpoint to ensure that its proposal would be well-received by management and staff alike. The medical surgical unit that I currently work on faced a specific set of challenges regarding patient fall prevention. Its nursing station was not centrally placed, meaning the audibility of fall alarms and their subsequent response times wavered in patient rooms distanced further from the nurse’s station. The floor was also designed with 14 private patient rooms with the only barrier of privacy being their door. For fall-risk patients requesting a visual barrier of privacy, the only way to accomplish this was to close their door, leading to a potential for decreased alarm response times. Placing doorstops that propped open their doors just enough to allow for sound to travel but also ensuring near complete visual privacy was my solution for fall prevention. The doorstops were attached to the side of the door and required no alteration to the doors as they were removable and measured to fit the existing width of each door. A blind study with staff from the facility was designed using the average distance between the nurses’ station and each patient room, equating to approximately 33 feet. One person would act as a patient randomly triggering the bed or chair alarm and recording the time it took for the nurse to respond to each alarm with the doorstop and without its use. The data from this experiment revealed that using these doorstops increased alarm audibility by 5-9 decibels between the chair and bed alarms. The average alarm response time showed that the doorstops reduced response timing by nearly 2 seconds. This project was eye-opening and thought provoking in the sense that the solution to long-standing problems in nursing may not always require large amounts of funding and that our responsibility as healthcare workers is not to fret about things out of our control. I learned that delivering high quality patient care necessitates an extremely high level of resourcefulness from medical professionals, and to do their best with what they’re given.  

​

References: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). The annual medical costs associated with slips and falls. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov