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Screening the risk of falls: a general or a specific instrument?
Cornelia Heinze1, Theo Dassen, Ruud Halfens
1Department of Nursing Science, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany. cornelia.heinze@charite.de
Aims And Objectives:
The aim of this study is to investigate if a general instrument (Care Dependency Scale; CDS) has the same sensitivity and specificity as a specific instrument (Hendrich Fall Risk Model; HFRM) in a screening for fall risks.
Background:
Falls of older patients are a common problem in hospitals. Apart from falls risk, nurses have to use many assessment tools to detect the patients' different care problems. To decrease the workload it would be helpful to have a general instrument used as a first screening for possible risks for different healthcare problems, such as falls, instead of specific risk instruments for each individual healthcare problem.
Design:
A prospective design was used by measuring each patient upon admission and by registering all falls during their hospital stay.
Methods:
The sample consisted of 560 patients of a geriatric hospital in Germany. All of whom gave their informed consent to participate in the study. Nurses filled in the CDS and the HFRM at the time of hospital admission.
Results:
The CDS (cut off point
Conclusion:
The results of the CDS are similar to those of the HFRM in predicting falls. Relevance to clinical practice. The use of the CDS is preferred as it is more general and more reliable than the HFRM. The workload for nursing staff can be decreased when only one instrument is used.
