Paper: Reliability and Validity of the Stratify Fall Risk Score of Falls in an Acute Care Setting (19th International Nursing Research Congress Focusing on Evidence-Based Practice)

Monday, 7 July 2008

Shu Feng Chien, RN, BA , Committee of Quality care and Patient Safety, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan

Yu-chih Chen, PhD , Nursing Department, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan

Learning Objective 1: 1.Evaluate STRATIFY fall risk assessment tool intra-rater and inter-rater reliability.

Learning Objective 2: 2.Evaluate how STRATIFY fall risk assessment tool can be used in acute care setting and what its clinical validity is.

Effective strategies against fall accidents, which is an indicator of a safe and qualified care in clinical setting, relies heavily on the availability of a prepared assessment tool to identify the high-risk patients in time. The present study aims to evaluate how STRATIFY fall risk assessment tool can be used in Taiwan and what its clinical validity is. This prospective study enrolled two medical centers and community hospitals respectively who participated in the Taiwan Quality Indicator Project (TQIP) .three wards from each hospital that had top incidents of falls were selected for study to make up a total of 650 inpatients. The result confirmed that STRATIFY is with good reliability, saying, both inter-rater reliability and intra-rater reliability are more than 0.8. Using 2 points as the cut-off value for validity assessment, we obtained64.1% sensitivity, 70.7% specificity, 6.3% positive predict value and 98.5% negative predict value. In summary, STRATIFY performed poorly as a predictor of falls in multidisciplinary acute care setting. There is need for a disease-specific rather than a generic fall risk assessment tool.

See more of: POSTERS: Acute Care Populations/Setting
See more of: Evidence-Based Practice Sessions – Oral Paper & Posters