The Effectiveness of the Fall Prevention Guideline in a Long-Term Care Facility

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify the effects of the fall prevention guideline on fall attitude, fall knowledge, and fall prevention self-efficacy of care workers in a long-term care facility. Method: The research design of this study is a nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest design. The subjects consisted of 58 care workers in a long-term care facility in Seoul, South Korea. The number of participants in the experimental group was 27 and the control group had 31 participants. Participants in experimental group were provided the fall prevention guideline program for 12 times, once a week. The structure-questionnaire consists of fall attitude, fall knowledge, and fall prevention self-efficacy. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS 22.0 program which utilized paired t-test, independent t-test. To examine the effect of the fall prevention guideline in a long-term care facility based on the pretest and posttest, a paired t-test was used. An independent t-test was performed to determine if there were differences between the experimental and control groups. Results: Following the independent t-test analysis in this study, attitude (t=2.19, p=0.02) and efficacy (t=1.91, p=0.03) in experimental group were significantly higher than control group. Following the paired t-test, knowledge (t=2.01, p=0.03) and efficacy (t=2.53, p=0.01) were observed to be improved in experimental group. On the contrast, it is observed that attitude (t=-3.18, p=0.00), and knowledge (t=3.17, p=0.00) is significantly regressed in control group. Conclusion: The finding of this study suggests that the fall prevention guideline has an effect on fall prevention self-efficacy of care workers in a long-term care facility. Thus, implementing the fall prevention guideline in long-term care facilities will facilitate systematical fall prevention approach and enable to decrease fall rate of older adults living in long-term care facilities. The longer term development and practical application of the fall prevention guideline is recommended for intervention

Keywords: fall prevention, fall attitude, fall knowledge, self-efficacy