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Patient Safety Measures:

Preventing Patient Falls in the Hospital

What are we measuring and why?

A simple fall during a hospital stay can cause serious and potentially life-threatening injuries for patients. We measure the rate of adult patient falls in many of our individual units in our hospitals. By knowing how we’re doing, we can create the safest healing environment possible.

How are we doing and how do we compare to national best practice?

PatientCareLink is a voluntary quality and safety initiative in Massachusetts. It is made up of members of the Massachusetts Hospital Association (MHA), which includes Partners HealthCare hospitals. As part of their statewide voluntary program, members report patient falls that result in injury. To make comparisons among hospitals meaningful, experts compare how many falls with injury occur for every 1,000 patient days during the same time period. Most Partners HealthCare hospitals performed similar to their respective state peer group average across most types of the patient areas in the hospital reported.

What are we doing to improve?

Hospital teams want to bolster the safety of patients. They are focusing on several steps. These include:

Careful screening for risk of falling
Patient monitoring
Education of patients and caregivers to reduce the risk of falls
Use of bed alarms, in some cases

This work is ongoing under the Partners HealthCare Nursing leadership. We expect our rates to improve even more as we continue to make use of additional interventions.

Charts for Preventing Patient Falls in the Hospital

Brigham and
Women's Hospital
Massachusetts
General Hospital
Newton-Wellesley
Hospital
Brigham and
Women's Faulkner
NSMC
Salem
NSMC
Union