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Final Draft: Perception of Falls from Nurses
Marc Junchaya
Department of Nursing, William Paterson University
NUR 6021-803 - Nursing Research Strategies
Dr. Beth Karasin
December 21, 2025
, Peer Review Draft: Perception of Falls from Nurses
As a charge nurse in my medical-surgical unit, one of my most substantial responsibilities
is to ensure the safety of all the patients in my unit. However, this year alone, we have had
seventeen falls, with only three of them being unpreventable. These falls have significant clinical
consequences for the patient, resulting in prolonged hospital stays and increased complications.
Previous studies have demonstrated that 30% of all falls result in significant injury to the patient,
dramatically increasing their hospital stay; as a result, these falls in the United States on average
cost acute care hospitals between 1.6% to 13.4% of their annual income (Montejano et al., 2020).
Falls that could have been prevented end up having a major impact, as patients trying to recover
are now subjected to a new issue they must face, and hospitals lose resources that could help
enrich patient care. Nurses are on the frontline of patient care and work directly with patients;
because of this, nurses have an increased responsibility in preventing falls. Nurses play a crucial
role in preventing falls through assessment, communication with the interdisciplinary team, and
documentation; these factors help nurses identify the patient’s risk for falls and construct
patient-specific interventions to meet their needs to prevent falls (Ojo & Thiamwong, 2022).
Nurses play a crucial part in preventing patient falls and ultimately create a safer environment for
their patients. Despite this, falls remain a major concern in the hospital, jeopardizing the safety of
patients, even though nursing interventions could have prevented them.
When nurses identify that their patients are at risk for falls, fall prevention interventions
have been successful at keeping patients safe. Scales such as the MORSE fall scale have been
shown to reduce falls in hospitals, helping predict the severity of falls in patients, as high-risk
individuals are more likely to have a higher incidence of severe injury (Montejano et al., 2020).
By identifying the patients who are at the highest risk for falling, nurses identify which
, interventions they must implement to maintain safety for the patient. One common intervention
for patients is fall monitoring systems, which, when implemented, demonstrate a significant
decrease in falls, dropping from 10 falls per 1000 patient days to 7 falls per 1000 patient days
after proper utilization (Ren & Peng, 2019). This indicates that when nurses can identify
high-risk patients, the interventions they implement, like alarm systems, work at keeping their
patients safe. Despite the evidence on the benefits of fall prevention interventions, during
post-fall investigations, these crucial safety measures have not been implemented.
A national compliance survey conducted throughout acute care hospitals throughout the
nation uncovered that the compliance among nurses in initiating and maintaining fall prevention
interventions was only 52% (Deleeuw et al., 2022). This shows that only slightly more than half
of nurses throughout the country actually implement fall precautions, which paves the path for
patients to increase their risk for falling. This is troubling, as researchers from multiple studies
identified that 30% of all falls could have been prevented by assessing the patient’s risks and
implementing proper interventions (Lelaurin & Shorr, 2019). The safety of patients is
jeopardized due to nursing noncompliance in both identifying high-risk patients for falls and
failure in implementing precautions. Despite interventions such as the MORSE scale and fall
monitors being shown to be effective at stopping falls, nurses remain noncompliant in fully
utilizing them, creating opportunities for preventable falls to occur. To better protect our patients,
we must identify what causes noncompliance in nurses initiating fall prevention.
Purpose and Aim
My research project aims to further explore the perception of nurses regarding why they
have omitted fall precaution interventions. By understanding the barriers that lead nurses to omit
fall interventions, we can then implement strategies to minimize or eliminate them. By