Content area
Full Text
Ms. Bradley is Clinical Nurse Specialist, Ochsner Medical Center Westbank, Gretna, Louisiana.
The institution has a contract with AvaSure and is currently utilizing AvaSys video monitoring system.
The author has disclosed no potential conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise.
Clinical staff are challenged daily to identify risks and implement prevention measures to keep patients from falling. Adequately mastering and sustaining this skill has been a challenge in nursing for decades primarily because fall prevention is complex and involves individualized multimodal patient interventions. Often, when all else fails, nurses turn to one-to-one safety sitters as an intervention to prevent falls that can be costly to health care institutions ( Rochefort, Ward, Ritchie, Girard, & Tamblyn, 2012 ). Remote video monitoring is becoming more popular as an alternative to safety sitters and is beginning to show its worth in reducing inpatient falls ( Brown & Wollosin, 2013 ).
Challenges with Safety Sitters
Safety sitters are typically used in hospitals to directly observe one to two patients to prevent patients from falling or injuring themselves. Safety sitters are a resource that are often not readily available to nursing staff due to the difficulty in predicting when they are needed. Hence, this frequently results in acquiring per diem staff or removing a staff member (i.e., unit secretary, nursing assistant, or nurse) from their shift assignment to monitor fall risk patients. Frequent changes in staffing assignments or removing ancillary resources to sit can lead to negative perceptions of job satisfaction.
Safety sitters increase care delivery costs associated with staffing and redirect available resources from patients with less risk to those at a higher risk. A recent study at a U.S. institution estimated their annual sitter cost at...