Preventing Patient Falls

Preventing Patient Falls presents the authoritative Morse Fall Scale for predicting the likelihood of a patient falling. The book is the culmination of the author's eight years of research into patient falls and what can be done to prevent them.

Full guidance is given on implementing the Morse Fall Scale within a comprehensive fall prevention programme. An extensive range of direct practice issues is tackled.

Mildred O. Hogstel

This 150-page book discusses the major problem of patient falls. The book is centered around the author's research, development, and use of the Morse Fall Scale. The purposes of the book are to make research on patient falls applicable to clinical practice, present a fall prevention program, discuss the proper use and benefits of the Morse Fall Scale, and stress that administrators need to support fully a fall prevention program. The audience should be administrators, nurses, physical therapists, and other healthcare providers who work with patients, especially those who are high risk for falling, in any setting. The three major types of falls are identified, defined, and discussed. The Morse Fall Scale is featured in the assessment of those patients who are high risk for falling. Numerous practical preventive interventions are presented. The development of the Morse Fall Scale is discussed in detail in the appendix. Specific resources for various types of patient alarms are also presented in the appendix. The book is excellent because it is clear, practical, specific, based on research, and meets a need. A key point stressed is that the Morse Fall Scale does not prevent falls, but it identifies which patients are at risk for falling so that a preventive program can be implemented.

Janice Morse (RN, PhD [Anthropology], PhD [Nursing], DNurs [Hon], FAAN) is Director, International Institute of Qualitative Methodology, Professor, Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta, and Adjunct Professor, School of Nursing, Pennsylvania State University. She is a Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR) Senior Scientist and an AHFMR Senior Scholar. She has an interest in developing qualitative methods, and has published more than 200 articles and 13 books on clinical nursing research and research methods. Her more recent books include Qualitative research methods for health professionals (with P. A. Field), Qualitative health research, Qualitative nursing research: A contemporary dialogue, Critical issues in qualitative research, Completing a qualitative project, and The nature of qualitative evidence(with J. M. Swanson and A. Kuzel). She is the editor of Qualitative Health Research, an interdisciplinary journal publishing on qualitative methods and research. She was the 1987 Sigma Theta Tau Episteme Laureate, and in 1999 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle, Australia, for her contribution to nursing knowledge. She is presently funded by CIHR to conduct a qualitative study on suffering and enduring.