Do patients accurately perceive their fall risk?

Abstract

In U.S. hospitals, from 700,000 to 1 million inpatients fall each year. About a third of these falls could have been prevented. This project's purpose was to document patient perceptions of their inpatient fall risk and determine how these perceptions were associated with clinical indicators of fall risk. From six medical-surgical units, 193 patients were randomly selected and surveyed about their perceived fall risk during their hospital stay. For 101 of them, the Schmid fall risk assessment score, age, and gender were recorded. A retrospective review of the Schmid scores of all patients who fell during a 6-month historical sample period was reviewed for comparison. Most patients (88%) reported that they didn't feel at risk for falling during their hospital stay. No correlation between their Schmid score and their perceived fall risk was found. Historical review of all inpatients who'd fallen in a prior period showed that the 358 patients with known Schmid scores had a full range of scores. These are normally distributed from 0 to 6, with over 40% of patients experiencing falls having Schmid scores of less than 3. Patient perceptions of falls match neither their clinical risk nor their actual likelihood of falling. When designing fall prevention strategies, it may be important to remind providers of this gap in patient knowledge, which includes overconfidence in the role of the care team in preventing falls