Safety Scripting for falls and pressure ulcers

Purpose:
To help decrease the occurrence of falls and pressure ulcers by developing safety scripting for nurses when educating their patients. The goal of this strategy is to develop a consistent message for the patients of what they should expect during their hospital stay.

Background/Significance:
This will provide the nurse with standard communication to patients during their hospital stay. This will help facilitate the patient to utilize the tools (i.e. non-skid footwear, bed and call light education)that we provider for them to keep them safe. Also, with the respect to decreasing the rate of falls and pressure ulcers.

Methods:
We are currently developing a safety script for the nurse to use when a patient gets admitted to their unit and to use during hourly rounding. The script will cover different items the patient should expect and make them aware of the different safety items (i.e. using the restroom, and how to use the call light). This will open up the communication between nurse and patient. This with anticipation will make the patient feel more at ease when asking the nurse questions and for help. We are going to pilot the safety scripting on one unit and do continual PDSA cycles until the process is consistent. We will implement it throughout the hospital.

Results:
We hope that implementing the safety scripting this will decrease patient falls and pressure ulcers. We will be able to trend falls and pressure ulcer data from the first 6 months of the year and as we develop our scripting and tracking, through our PDSA cycles, we will be able to trend it with the last 6 months of the year. This will determine if the safety scripting helped decrease our prevalence rates.

Conclusions and Implications for Practice:
The safety-scripting tool will help the nurses utilize this vital communication piece when educating patients during their hospital stay. With anticipation of decreasing falls and pressure ulcers in our patient population.