The Falls among Nursing Home Residents---The Prevalence, Risk Factors, Screening and Prevention Strategy Regarding Falling

Successful preventing falls is a key issue to provide quality health care in a nursing home with numerous older subjects. Therefore, a screening method for early identification of elderly adults who require intensive, non-routine intervention needs to be established. We will developed a screening sheet base on searching the literature, a cohort survey and consultation of experts, then, conduct a prospective cohort study to examine its usefulness in predicting the need for fall-preventing planning. Also, we will develop and examine an intervention for preventing falls among nursing home residents. This project is proposed to be a three-year project. The purposes of this project are to identify the risk factors of falls among the elderly who live in nursing homes; develop and validate of a fall risk screening tool for use in nursing homes; and develop and test an intervention to diminish the falls among nursing home residents in Taiwan. At the 1st year, a randomized 8 nursing homes (about 480 beds) in northern Taiwan will be invited to participate this study for identifying the prevalence and risk factors of falls. At the 2nd year, We will developed a screening sheet base on searching the literature, the results of 1st year study and consultation of experts, then, conduct a prospective cohort study to examine its usefulness in predicting the need for fall-preventing planning. At the 3rd year, 6 nursing homes will be recruited in to a 2-group pretest-posttest experimental design and randomly assigned to experimental groups and a comparison group. Prevalence rate of resident falls will be expressed by percentage. Logistic Regression will be used to determine which independent variables affect the dependent variables (fall rate). Criterion validity and receiver operation characteristics will be determined for the falling risk assessment tools. Comparability of the two randomized groups on baseline variables, analysis of variance and chi-square statistics will be used to test for differences in the distributions of the baseline variables. To address the effect of a multifactorial fall-prevention intervention, the data will be analyzed using a two-way between-within MANOVA. The results of this study can help health care providers of nursing homes in Taiwan to identify elderly adults living in nursing homes who are at risk of falls and individualize their interventions to the specific needs' of the residents of nursing homes, thus helping to prevent from falling among residents of nursing homes in Taiwan.

Project ID:PC10007-1156
External Project ID:NSC100-2314-B182-027