Fall Prevention Techniques and Patient Exercises Essay

Literature Review

Fall risk in acute care is one of the primary causes of the appearance of a wide range of complications. The latter may significantly decrease the quality of lives of elderly patients and deprive them of an opportunity to recover.

Realizing the importance of the discussed topic, many researchers in the field have devoted a lot of their time to studying the factors connected to the falls experienced by elderly patients. For instance, one particular method to decrease fall rates among the elderly was studied by El-Khoury, Cassou, Charles, and Dargent-Molina (2013). Their study was aimed at extending the knowledge on fall prevention methods and they focused on exercise intervention for patients. Among other things, the authors concluded that exercise programs could help to decrease not only fall rates but also the number of cases when falls resulted in heavy injuries. Therefore, it has been proven that exercises may help to fulfill two goals: to make falls in the elderly occur less often and to mitigate their negative effects for patients.Fall Prevention Techniques and Patient Exercises Essay

The importance of physical exercises (especially those aimed at strengthening trunk muscles) was also studied by Granacher, Gollhofer, Hortobágyi, Kressig, and Muehlbauer (2013). Nevertheless, the conclusion that they made was different from one of the previous studies. The authors proved that the correlation between the strength of trunk muscles and fall rates was not as strong as expected; therefore, they did not confirm the great importance of such exercises for fall prevention.

The study conducted by Sherrington et al. (2016) is also devoted to assessing the effects of special exercises on fall rates. More than that, the authors focused on the importance of self-help measures explained to the patients.

Another important research related to the approaches to fall prevention was conducted by Miake-Lye, Hempel, Ganz, and Shekelle (2013) whose conclusions also confirmed the idea of the importance of exercise interventions supported by a great number of other researchers working in the field. On top of that, they proved that the most effective training programs were primarily multicomponent. Nevertheless, speaking about the particular measures, it is necessary to say that the authors concluded that there was little evidence allowing to single out a few exercises that could be called the most effective, and this fact can be regarded as a significant knowledge gap that needs to be filled.Fall Prevention Techniques and Patient Exercises Essay

Another important factor that could help to prevent falls and was connected to bodily comfort was studied by Chari et al. (2016). The researchers focused on wearing special footwear and its role in helping the patients to move safely. In the end, they concluded that there was an additional problem connected to patients’ lack of knowledge concerning the importance of proper footwear and clothes.Fall Prevention Techniques and Patient Exercises Essay

It can be said that there is a certain diversity of opinions related to the role of physical exercises in fall prevention. Nevertheless, it is important to extend the knowledge on fall prevention methods and their effectiveness in acute care settings with the help of further research.

Methodology and Design

Due to the urgency of the problem, it is necessary to fill the knowledge gap and consider the problem from the point of view of the nurses working in acute care settings. Therefore, the present research is aimed at defining the most popular methods of fall prevention among nurses and comparing their opinions on their effectiveness to the outcomes of important experiments in the field. At the end of the research, it will be possible to formulate a set of recommendations that can be helpful for the nurses in acute care. The study will consist of two parts.Fall Prevention Techniques and Patient Exercises Essay