The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare has released a Targeted Solutions Tool for preventing patient falls in the hospital, which has the potential to decrease rates of falls with injury by 62 percent.
The Preventing Falls TST is an online resource with a step-by-step process to help hospitals measure their fall rates, find barriers to fall prevention and implement solutions customized to address those barriers.
The tool was developed with the assistance of seven collaborating hospitals. Those hospitals were able to reduces the rate of falls by 35 percent and falls with injury by 62 percent, according to the Joint Commission. Those seven hospitals are:
- Barnes-Jewish Hospital (St. Louis)
- Baylor Medical Center-Garland (Texas)
- Fairview Health Services (Minneapolis)
- Kaiser Permanente-San Diego
- Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center (Houston)
- Wake Forest Baptist Health (Winston-Salem, N.C.)
- Wentworth Douglass Hospital (Dover, N.H.)
The tool is free to Joint Commission-accredited organizations. Find more information here.