Linking Interventions to Risk Factors – Expanded Version: This document, created the UNMC CAPTURE Falls team, is an expanded version of the Quick Reference Guide: Linking Interventions to Risk Factors” document on the Intervention Tools page. It can be used to support practice with clinical-decision-making skills needed to select interventions for an individualized fall risk reduction plan of care. It includes a one-page table that summarizes interventions to consider for various fall risk factors and expands it with information about the rationale for why certain interventions help address a given risk factor.
Fall Risk Reduction Intervention Case Study Development Guide: This document, created by the UNMC CAPTURE Falls team, provides step-by-step instructions for how to develop case studies using your own patient population, including information to collect from the medical record and suggested questions for discussion. These cases can be used to give staff practice applying your organization’s policies, as well as clinical-decision-making skills for linking interventions to specific fall risk factors.
Customizable Staff Education Slide Deck: This PowerPoint file, created by the UNMC CAPTURE Falls team, can be used to support delivery of an educational presentation to staff on fall risk reduction interventions. It is primarily focused on the selection of interventions to reduce fall risk but could also be used/adapted to address the delivery of interventions. It can also be adapted to align with your organization’s policies and procedures for fall risk reduction interventions.
Customizable Staff Knowledge Assessment: This document, created by the UNMC CAPTURE Falls team, contains multiple-choice, multiple-answer, and true/false questions you can use to evaluate staff knowledge about fall risk reduction interventions. Questions are grouped by intervention. Most questions focus on what risk factors a given intervention is intended to address and the rationale of why an intervention should be used. You can select which questions to use, depending on what you want to emphasize in your staff education.
Choosing Fall Prevention Practices:Section 3 Which fall prevention practices do you want to use? in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Fall Prevention Toolkit provides information on how to apply universal fall prevention interventions (Section 3.2) and how to use identified risk factors for fall prevention care planning (Section 3.4).
Preventing Falls in Hospitalized Patients: State of the Science:A review article published in 2019 in Clinics of Geriatric Medicine describes the challenges in conducting well-designed research on hospital fall-risk-reduction interventions and summarizes some of the current evidence for common interventions.
Interventions for Preventing Falls in Older People in Care Facilities and Hospitals:A systematic review published in 2018 in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews summarizes research evidence about the effects of interventions for preventing falls. Pages 52-54 in this document provide a concise summary of the main findings for various interventions. It is worth noting that uncertainty exists regarding the effects of various interventions, particularly when studied as single interventions. This is in part due to the challenges of conducting rigorous research on a multifactorial problem in a complex environment.
Interventions to reduce falls in hospitals: a systematic review and meta-analysis.A systematic review and meta-analysis published in 2022 in Age and Ageing summarizes research evidence about a variety of fall prevention interventions on fall rates and risk of falling in the hospital. Patient and staff education, as well as multifactorial interventions, were found to have favorable effects on reducing hospital falls.