Open Post #2: Injury Prevention for Inpatients

While scrolling the internet I came across and interesting article about different things that registered nurses have observed help inpatients from falling and injuring themselves even more. Most inpatients have declining health issues so support from hospital staff is what keeps them going. The nurses cannot be with the patient for their entire stay though, so a study was conducted at 5 hospitals to identify ways to prevent in hospital injuries. The study was done in the general area of the hospital and in the surgical area of the hospital. The researcher found that the number one best thing to do to stop inpatient injury is to always keep the brakes on their beds locked. If a patient is injured and cannot move and their bed starts rolling it can potentially rip I.V's out, hurt other patients and or themselves. It is also mentioned that keeping heavy equipment out of the patients way and removing clutter are good ways to avoid injury. Also the study said that doing a mental capacity test daily will keep patients that are just sitting in their bed all day on their toes and mentally aware of what is going on. Keeping non-slip foot wear on patients is also an extremely good idea, something like slippers that are soft on the inside but padded for grip on the bottom are the optimal choice for inpatients. It is actually very easy for inpatients to hurt themselves that is why having handrails in a hospital helps people that are still weak on their feet to get around. Making sure that their beds are low to the ground is also smart for two reasons, the first is so that they can easily get into the bed, the second is if they manage to fall off the bed it will not be a far drop. This particular statistic was mentioned by both the surgical team and the medical team, so even something simple like the height of a bed can be important in helping patients. I personally did not know these types of things were important before looking at this study, so I find that pretty interesting. I never thought about how hard it is for people with declining health to move around so it makes sense that these things need to be done to prevent further injuries. If you want to see the statistics of this study the link is hyperlinked here.