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Nurses respond to fallers' call lights more quickly than they do to lights initiated by non-fallers. The nurses' responsiveness to call lights could be a compensatory mechanism in responding to the fall prevalence on the unit.
Fall prevention programs for hospitalized patients have had limited success because patients have increasingly complex disorders and functional deficits and staff members often fail to consider pertinent risks such as a patient's tendency to overstep physical limitations (Jeske et al., 2006). Human errors are common and have a negative impact on patient safety. For example, Hicks, Bandiera, and Denny (2008) concluded the majority of physician and nurse participants believe human factors are more important in determining emergency department patient outcomes than medical knowledge or procedural skills. However, the importance of content knowledge and procedural skills for determining resuscitation outcomes are not in dispute. Because resuscitation requires the coordinated efforts of an interdisciplinary team, formal team training education and structured performance feedback were identified as effective ways to improve team dynamics.
Human factors seem to dominate the impact of fall prevention efforts that address risk factors related to the environment (e.g., patient room design and equipment) (Tzeng & Yin, 2008). However, human factors (e.g., adherence to a fall prevention protocol) rarely were studied and quantified. For example, Tzeng and Yin (2009a) conceptualized nurses' response time to call lights as a process indicator that predicts patients' overall hospital experience because when the average call light response time was longer, patients were less satisfied with hospital nursing care. Both patients and nurses perceived a long call light response time was an extrinsic risk factor for falling (Tzeng & Yin, 2008; 2009b). Consequently, it was proposed nurses' responsiveness to call lights could be an objective, nursing-sensitive, human factorrelated indicator that may determine the effectiveness of any fall prevention program and predict fall occurrence.
Purpose
This exploratory study evaluated a putative model of nurses' response time to call lights in discriminating non-fallers from fallers in an acute inpatient rehabilitation unit (see Figure 1 and Table 1). Authors proposed longer nurses' call light response time would lead to a higher probability of falling before a fall actually occurred. After a fall occurred, nurses would respond to fallers' call lights more quickly than to the...