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. 2021 Aug 2;18(15):8167.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph18158167.

Hospital Inpatient Falls across Clinical Departments

Marcin Mikos  1 , Tomasz Banas  2 , Aleksandra Czerw  3   4 , Bartłomiej Banas  5 , Łukasz Strzępek  6 , Mateusz Curyło  7
Affiliations

Hospital Inpatient Falls across Clinical Departments

Marcin Mikos et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Background: Inpatient falls are common hospital adverse events. We aimed to determine inpatient fall rates in an urban public hospital and analyzed their characteristics across clinical departments.

Methods: The study was conducted in a 350-bed urban, multi-specialty public hospital in the 2013-2019 period. Patient data were retrieved from the hospital's standardized falls reporting system. Descriptive statistics and statistical tests: chi2 and ANOVA tests with multiple comparison tests (post-hoc analysis) were used. For fall incidence estimation a joint-point regression was applied. p-value of 0.05 was considered as statistically significant for all the calculations.

Results: The highest prevalence of falls was reported in the rehabilitation and internal medicine wards (1.915% and 1.181%, respectively), the lowest in the orthopedic (0.145%) and rheumatology wards (0.213%) (p < 0.001). The vast majority of falls took place in the late evening and during the night (56.711%) and were classified as bed falls (55.858%). The crude incidence rate (cIR) of falls was 6.484 per one thousand hospitalizations. In the 2013-2017 period, an increase in total cIR was observed, reaching the peak value in 2016; it was followed by a slight decline from 2017 to 2019, however, differences in changes were observed between the wards.

Conclusion: Fall rates and trends as well as circumstances of inpatient falls varied significantly among clinical departments, probably due to differences in patient characteristics.

Keywords: elderly patients; fall; fall assessment sheet; hospitalization; risk management.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Trends of median hospital stay and annual number of admissions across the analyzed clinical departments. $ NS—non-significant; * significant p-value.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Trend of patient falls (Crude incidence ratio [cIR] per 1000 patients-beds) for all the departments. * please pay attention to a different scale.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Trends of falls (crude incidence ratio (cIR) per 1000 patient beds) across the analyzed clinical departments; & no trend available due to 0 cases of inpatient falls in several years; * please pay attention to a different scale.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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