Develop a Prioritized List of Physical Design Interventions to Reduce Patient Falls

Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX

Investigators

Abstract

Project Summary/ Abstract Develop a Prioritized List of Physical Design Interventions to Reduce Patient Falls This proposal seeks funding for secondary (additional) analyses of data generated from a completed study on patient falls, funded by the National Patient Safety Foundation in 2013. At the time of the original study, understanding of patient falls was mostly restricted to intrinsic factors of patients. While there was (and still is) an agreement among clinicians that physical design of the built environment constitutes a key factor contributing to patient falls, studies on this topic were few and scattered. Our aforementioned study used a novel methodological approach ? motion capture technology ? during scripted activities in a physical mock-up of a room and bathroom to identify the exact points in time when falls were initiated. Two additional necessary steps are needed for effective translation of the original study findings to interventions in actual sites of fall occurrence. First, while the list of physical design attributes and entities identified in the original study is new and informative for developing potential physical design interventions, the analysis did not provide information for prioritizing entities/attributes on the list. Since healthcare facility owners and providers continuously struggle with optimization of limited capital (during new constructions as well as during use of a facility), additional analyses are needed to prioritize the identified interventions and aid healthcare decision-makers in allocating available capital. This study will conduct additional analyses of our original data set to develop a prioritized list of physical design solutions, based on rank-ordered probability of fall occurrence. This proposed study is necessary before proceeding to the second step: rigorous empirical testing of hypothesized high-efficacy physical design alternative solutions generated from the original study to reduce patient falls (which will constitute a follow-up proposal from this study PI).