A pilot study, recently presented in a report in the Journal of Clinical Nursing, provides useful initial findings for the use of nursing home (NH) administration in the assessment and reduction of falls risk. The researchers surveyed a small sample of NH directors of nursing (DON), observed the institutional and environmental falls risk factors in visits to a subset of these directors’ NHs, and conducted follow-up interviews with some of these DONs.
These initial pilot findings suggest that the perceptions of DONs are useful for studies on falls risk, and that clinical, staffing, and administrative policies may be a practical target for fall reduction interventions. In this study, the authors tested questionnaires about fall-related injuries and about environmental fall risk, and found that, at least according to the reports of the DONs, clinical policies, administrative policies, and staffing were all related to NH fall rates. This may lead to future research on ways that NH administrative policies may be used to reduce falls risk, which is a potentially useful complement to other falls reduction research that focuses on at-risk individuals as intervention targets.
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