Etiology of Head Injuries due to Falls in Clinical Situations and Nursing Care to Preventing Injuries

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the causes behind falling accidents that are directly encountered by nurses which are associated with a high rate of injury. Falls often result in physical trauma and this type of accident is common in medical care facilities. The present research uses crash test dummies as models for investigating human posture during falls and verifying predictions of the severity of the resulting head injury. Fall simulations were based on preliminary experiments conducted at the Japan Automobile Research In‑ stitute and performed under conditions commonly seen in medical care facilities. The fall was directed rearward without defensive posturing onto a tile floor with head injury criterion (HIC 100.4 at 42.1 G collision acceleration and onto a linoleum floor with HIC 80.2 at 37.2 G collision acceleration. In both cases we found an extremely high risk of cranial fracture or other direct injury. Angular acceleration of the head during the fall reached 4371 rad s 2 respectively. This indicates a high risk of concussive trauma such as acute epidural hematoma. These results indicate that falls pose a serious risk in medical care facilities. To reduce the incidence of head injury due to falls by patients for whom adopting a defensive posture is difficult such as those who are awake at night or have dementia both direct head trauma and rotation of the head and neck should be re‑ duced. These results reveal that falling is associated with a very high risk of direct injury including head frac‑ tures. Maximum angular acceleration of the head during a postural change accompanying falling was esti‑ mated at 4371 rad sec 2 . These values indicate a very high risk of concussion injury. Therefore protecting not