Incorporating Pharmacist Interns Into a Study of Fall-Risks

INTRODUCTION: Inpatient falls continue to have detrimental effects on patient care and recovery. Because controllable and uncontrollable factors impact fall rates, predicting which patients are at the greatest risk can be challenging. One method includes the incorporation of student learners to help identify which patients are at the greatest risk for falls.
OBJECTIVE: To generate a scoring metric and investigate its reliability for appropriately identifying geriatric and medical psychiatric patients at risk for falling while hospitalized.
METHODS: In this single-center, quasi-experimental study, pharmacist-interns led a fall-prevention initiative at a community hospital within two behavioral health units.
RESULTS: A total of 96 patients were analyzed over the study period, revealing no notable trends for either geriatric or medical psychiatric patients. There was no significant change in the odds of falling for each fall score point increase for either the geriatric-psychiatric unit (odds ratio [OR] = 0.95; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.83-1.08) or the medical-psychiatric unit (OR = 1.11; 95% CI 0.91-1.36).
CONCLUSION: This pharmacist-intern-led falls-prevention initiative did not provide a statistically significant reduction in falls. While the scoring metric was helpful in reviewing charts to make recommendations for interventions, the assigned score did not correlate as expected to incidents of falls.