Abstract
Among our 5336 incident/accident reports in our hospital from Apr. 2002 to Mar. 2003, 614 cases were reported on accidental falls with 26 cases (4%) at higher than Level 3. This number is about 1/4 of all accident reports in higher than Level 3 injury.
The accidental fall occurred mostly from midnight to morning, where the elderly over 80 years of age tended to have accident with higher than Level 3. The most common place was sickrooms (64%), although the incidence varied among wards in the rate of occurrence. We now have developed a simple surveillance equipment for getting out of bed interlocked with the nurse call system and have applied to 28 patients in 10 different wards. We concluded that the surveillance equipment was effective in preventing accident falls from the hospital bed by half. Among 10 wards provided with our prevention equipment, 7 wards were reported to be effective for preventing accidental falls, and 6 wards requested for continual use of our surveillance equipment even after the trial.
We are now looking forward to commercialization of our surveillance equipment for preventing accidental falls from the hospital bed.
