Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) on Fall Prevention - Essay Example

For many patients, the consequences include among other things, fear of falling, fracture, head injury, soft tissue injury, depression and anxiety. Research indicates that an estimated 30 percent of hospital-based falls leads to serious injury (World health Organization. Ageing and Life Course Unit, 2008). A number of factors have been identified to be the contributors of the complexity of sustaining the actual fall reduction and the prevention of harm and injuries. These include rising patient acuity, aging population, shortage of nurses and poor-working environment for the care givers.

Leadership plays a key role in understanding the problem, creating safety climate culture and improving work condition of care providers so that direct nursing time needed for patient care can be increased. The objective of this paper is to explore performance improvement method, Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) implemented by fall based team as a strategy to reduce patient fall and its related problems at Children’s Memorial Center (Chicago). This research is based on the problems associated with the increase in fall rate in a hospital’s telemetry unit at Children’s Memorial Center (Chicago).

The hospital has employed several measures aimed at reducing the rate of patient fall in the facility below the national benchmark. This is by improving the current processes, involving patients and their family members in “call do not fall” education, and nurse education. The reduction in patient fall is regarded as an integral measure in improving clinical practice and ensures that the hospital is in compliant with the Joint Commission Standards (Jrc, 2008). This has helped the hospital in reducing the length of stay for patients as well as costs related to injuries sustained from such falls, associated incremental costs of additional patient care and diagnosis studies.

In order to achieve this, the hospital carry out