Paper
Friday, 21 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Programs and Models in Acute Care
Nursing Staff Awareness and Effectiveness of Fall Prevention
Shu Feng Chien, RN, BA, Committee of Quality care and Patient Safety, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan and Yu-chih Chen, PhD, Nursing Department, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
Learning Objective #1: understand the important that intensive educational program on fall prevention among nursing staffs.
Learning Objective #2: understand the influence of the education intervention on the fall reduction.
Objective
To determine the effectiveness of the intensive educational program on fall prevention among nursing staffs. We hypothesized that nursing staffs with greater awareness and concern about the fall prevention would have influence on the fall reduction.
Methods
A randomized controlled trial was conducted. Nursing staffs were selected from the participants of Taiwan Quality Indicator Projects, three medical centers and three regional hospitals, respectively. A total of 673 nursing staffs were included in the study, with 339 nurses in the intervention group and 334 nurses in the controlled group. A designed educational program including epidemiology of fall in Taiwan, fall assessment strategy as well as fall prevention protocol. The primary measures were knowledge scores and attitude scores of the subjects. The secondary measure was the rate of patient fall.
Results
The baseline characteristics were no significant different between the two groups. After completion of educational program, nurses in the intervention group exhibited higher knowledge scores than the control group (p <0.05) and showed more positive attitude toward fall prevention. For the intervention group, the differences in knowledge score and attitude score relative to the baseline scores were persisted at the 1-month assessment (p < .05). At baseline, the rate of patient fall was 0.29% and 0.28% for the intervention group and controlled group, respectively. Compared to controlled group, intervention group showed a significant fall reduction among at risk patients. 
Conclusion
An intensive educational program can greatly improve the knowledge scores and attitude scores of fall prevention among nurses. And the influence of the education intervention on the fall reduction is confirmed.

Key Words: fall education; nurse knowledge of fall; nurse attitude of fall; fall prevention

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