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CMW Sneak Peek: Hospital case managers should take on fall prevention strategies

Case Management Weekly, September 24, 2008

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As healthcare organizations look to October 1 as the day they will no longer be reimbursed by Medicare for hospital-acquired conditions (HAC), prevention becomes a crucial strategy for maximizing your facility’s financial return. One of the most preventable HACs in the spotlight is trauma caused by falls.

“If case management teams were to look at fall prevention as a quality of care issue, hospitals would see a rapid decline in falls at their facilities and a decrease in the number of patients that require care as a result of falls,” says Dinah Brothers, RN, JD, an attorney in Austin, TX.

That’s exactly the viewpoint Margo MacRobert, RNC, MS, CNAA-BC, assistant dean for clinical operations at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, is trying to communicate through her university’s statewide fall-prevention program.

“A lot of care providers say, ‘Old people will fall,’ and they want you to accept that as a rule. But we can’t accept that. Fifty percent of falls in people over 65 are caused by environmental factors, not age,” MacRobert says.

A 2007 study by the University of Oklahoma found that more than 50% of falls were from extrinsic factors. In contrast, 10% of falls resulted from intrinsic causes. The remaining 40% resulted from a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

Check out the September 2008 issue of Case Management Monthly to get the full story, and discover all the benefits of being a Case Management Monthly subscriber!

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