As a common adverse event in the medical environment, patient fall is one of the major sources of morbidity and mortality. The incidence of patient falls in the emergency department (ED) of Taiwan is higher than that of the United States and the United Kingdom. It may be due to the rushed working environment where medical services should be rapidly and urgently provided. However, few studies have examined the applicability of fall risk assessments utilized in the ED in Taiwan. Flarity et al. (2013) developed a high-risk fall assessment scale for emergency care in the United States, which is highly reliable and effective and has received positive feedback from ED nurses. If the scale is translated into Chinese and used in the ED in Taiwan, it will be the first fall-risk tool for ED in Taiwan and able to provide ED nurses with a useful tool to screen patients afflicted with high-risk falls.
Purpose:
The purposes of this study will be to develop Chinese Memorial Emergency Department Fall Risk Assessment Tool (MEDFRAT-C), to examine the cultural and linguistic equivalence of the MEDFRATs in English and Chinese version, and to establish the tool’s psychometric properties.
Methods:
The English MEDFRAT will be translated into Chinese by a five-step modified back translation procedure by Jones et al. (2001) and Wang et al. (2006). Specifically, a three-phase study will be conducted. In phase one, two English monolingual and two English-Chinese bilingual experts will be invited to translate the MEDFRAT into Chinese forward-backward to ensure the linguistic equivalence of the assessment tool, whose content validity will then be examined by nine experts. In phase two, the data collected from a convenience sample of 30 patients in the ED in a representative medical center in Taiwan will be used to assess the internal consistency of the MEDFART-C. In phase three, the psychometric properties of the MEDFART-C will be tested with other 594 ED patients in the same medical center.
Results:
This study will be the first MEDFART-C in Taiwan of high reliability and validity. It can be easily and quickly administered and provide nurses with a useful tool to assess high-fall-risk patients in the ED.
Conclusion:
The MEDFART-C can also contribute to early intervention care and further decrease fall-related adverse occurrences. The electronic version of the scale will be promoted in the future. With computers automatically calculating fall-risk scores, warning can be issued more efficiently to better prevent patient falls from happening.