Preventing Elderly Falls in Nursing Homes
QUESTION
Technology is integral to successful implementation in many projects, through either support or integration or both. Name at least one technology that could improve the implementation process and the outcomes of your EBP project. Do you plan to use this technology? If not, what are the barriers that prevent its use?
Preventing Elderly Falls in Nursing Homes
ANSWER
Preventing Elderly Falls in Nursing Homes
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Preventing Elderly Falls in Nursing Homes
A technology that could aid in preventing elderly falls in nursing homes is pressure monitors. Pressure monitors feature pressure-sensitive pads, which can be fitting on a chair or bed depending on the areas where patients are experiencing the greatest risk of falls. Potter et al. (2017) note that pressure monitors were specifically designed with the intention of identifying when an elderly patient rises from a chair or sits upright while in bed, which results in an automatic change in pressure; thus, triggering an alarm. One of the key challenges to contend with when dealing with patient falls is that nurses find it hard tracking individual patients to minimize their risk of falls. Use of pressure monitors is one of the key technological approaches considered to help track patients’ movements, which reduces the risk of falls significantly.
I plan to use this technology to implement the EBP project with the view being that it will accord me a better opportunity of tracking patients’ movements and determining some of the key risk factors they encounter leading to falls. Patient monitoring is an important step in preventing falls because it gives nurses an opportunity of advancing patient safety while creating a new way of identifying underlying risk factors (Rajagopalan, Litvan, & Jung, 2017). As I implement my EBP project, I will consider patient monitoring as one of the areas that I need to achieve my project’s objectives. Therefore, pressure monitors will play a critical role in ensuring that I am well positioned to monitor my patients. Additionally, these monitors will give me an opportunity of identifying patients with the greatest fall risk; hence, the need to monitor them much closely.
References
Potter, P., Allen, K., Costantinou, E., Klinkenberg, W. D., Malen, J., Norris, T., … & Wolf, L. (2017). Evaluation of sensor technology to detect fall risk and prevent falls in acute care. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, 43(8), 414-421.
Rajagopalan, R., Litvan, I., & Jung, T. P. (2017). Fall prediction and prevention systems: Recent trends, challenges, and future research directions. Sensors, 17(11), 2509.