Sounding the Alarm to Healthcare Leadership to Establish a Standardized Evidenced-based Falls Prevention Program: An Integrative Literature Review

Abstract

The dilemma for healthcare leadership is that interventions to prevent patient falls exist, but over the years it has been unclear as to which ones are the most effective and what strategies should be implemented to best support their needs (Delaforce et al., 2023). Because of the fact that national initiatives are aimed at preventing patient harm from falls, healthcare leaders have come to the conclusion that in order to be effective, a falls prevention program needs to be multi-faceted, which in turn produces a complex system. However, as the system becomes more complex, the risk of failures towards implementation also increases because the implementation of a falls prevention program can be influenced by several factors. Factors such as, environmental and contextual issues; staff knowledge, beliefs and attitudes; organizational culture and climate; staff workloads; patient education; and access to appropriate equipment to name a few, which are all driven by healthcare leadership (Ayton et. al, 2017). For this reason, the purpose of this study was to sound the alarm to healthcare leadership to establish a standardized evidenced based falls prevention program. By focusing on this, the researcher was successful in highlighting a series of fall risk assessment tools and interventions that has been known to develop fall prevention programs within healthcare. Equally important, the researcher provided several themes that has known to both inhibit and build fall prevention programs. Thereafter, the researcher then suggested two leadership strategies, reflexivity and resonant, for healthcare leaders to consider adopting as a means to help them develop effective fall prevention programs going forward.