MedicalNurseTraining.com

New inexpensive technologies by Safer Falls.com significantly reduce the risk of falls and protect against the effect of falls particularly in the population now approaching 60 and above. New personal use technologies that are relatively unknown to some in the medical field, and more often the public can easily eliminate these preventable injuries and deaths.  The National Center for Patient Safety recently recommended the use of these new approaches to be used in treating patients whom are at high risk.

Patrick Devaney, Founder of Medical Nurse Training, Inc; discusses the necessity of such products when dealing with an elderly person who is at risk for falls in Long Term Care Facilities or in-home.  “Many people who try to convalesce at home from hip fractures and head injuries don’t fully recover.  There are some new affordable devices that can prevent these injuries from ever occurring.” Mr. Devaney goes on about how each device can be necessary for care and each individual’s unique situation in the accompanying video.

Medical Nurse Training, Inc.  provides the latest on-line training to Doctors and Nurses on fall prevention and protection. This includes in-house education on devices that will reduce injury from falls and related deaths and on-line education for those concerned about falls at home.

Hip Protectors – High Impact – absorbing pads that help protect hip bones against injury from falls. About 320,000 people suffer a hip fracture every year.  These pads are built into briefs, panties, sweat pants and sweat shorts. They can easily be laundered and re-used numerous times to help protect from falls. The use of these devices has been clinically proven to reduce injury. Many individuals that experience a fall are afraid to continue normal activities like walking. These devices help these people resume a normal life. Hip Fracture is one of the number one causes of death in older individuals. Our experience shows that hip protectors are generally not known by the general public

Fall Alarms – Inexpensive bed and chair exit electronic monitors otherwise known as Fall Alarms, assist with the observation of patients and family members to help reduce falls and the potential for elopement from home or a facility. A variety of sensor accessories may be used including toileting sensors, bed/chair sensors, infrared sensors and self releasing sensors may be attached to the monitor to reduce risk. These alarms include a gentle voice reminder not to get up without assistance.

Floor Cushions and Bath Mats – Certain areas of the home are very high risk for injury from falls like the bathroom. Special floor cushions and bath mats are designed to help reduce the impact from a fall and are frequently talked about in the clinical literature. These floor cushions are tri-fold in design, making them convenient to carry to areas requiring the most immediate protection. Bathrooms are also very high risk zones. The sure step bath mat can be used to significantly reduce the impact of a fall.

A complete list of Fall Prevention Products and availability and Clinical Resources are available at www.SaferFalls.com.  Fall Prevention and Protection Training Programs are available at www.MedicalNurseTraining.com. 

Author Pat Devaney, President Medical Nurse Training

We are pleased to announce a partnership with very reputable fall device manufacturers to provide lifesaving, at home products for fall prevention and protection at institutional prices. As of August 24^th, 2009, we are including these fall products under a new section consumer fall prevention devices. The www.MedicalNurseTraining.com  site will be linked to the product site www.SaferFalls.com which will include these unique, discounted fall devices. Very often we hear from Doctors and Nurses, “where can I obtain these protective devices for at risk friends and relatives?” Many of these products are virtually unknown to the general public. Now there are some new and very inexpensive devices for home use to significantly reduce these injuries and costs.

There are a large number of people that never recover from a hip fracture at home.  Additionally, there have been a tremendous number of situations where family members wander away from home. These new devices significantly reduce this risk. Fall related injuries are very costly in lives and over $100 billion yearly in unnecessary medical expenses.

The President of Medical Nurse Training, Mr. Devaney had a personal tragedy when his mother died as the result of an unnecessary hip fracture. This loss could have easily been prevented with one of these new devices. Numerous lives have already been saved with these clinically proven fall protection products. We have just partnered with the Posey Company, the leader in the field, to offer these fall products at a great discount.

Medical Nurse Training provides the latest on-line training to Doctors and Nurses on fall prevention and protection. This includes in-house education on devices that will reduce injury from falls and related deaths. We will be carrying this process forward to educate the non medical community to help avoid the costly risk of falls at home. Some of these tremendous new technologies include comfortable Hip Protectors, Wireless Pagers for caregivers at home, fall and exit alarms, medical grade floor cushions, and bath mats.

Hip Protectors – High Impact – absorbing pads that help protect hip bones against injury from falls. About 320,000 people suffer a hip fracture every year.  These pads are built into briefs, panties, sweat pants and sweat shorts. They can easily be laundered and re-used numerous times to help protect from falls. The use of these devices has been clinically proven to reduce injury. Many individuals that experience a fall are afraid to continue normal activities like walking. These devices help these people resume a normal life. Hip Fracture is one of the number one causes of death in older individuals. Our experience shows that hip protectors are generally not known by the general public

Fall Alarms – Inexpensive bed and chair exit electronic monitors otherwise known as Fall Alarms, assist with the observation of patients and family members to help reduce falls and the potential for elopement from home or a facility. A variety of sensor accessories may be used including toileting sensors, bed/chair sensors, infrared sensors and self releasing sensors may be attached to the monitor to reduce risk. These alarms include a gentle voice reminder not to get up without assistance. Many of these devices are unknown to the general public.

Floor Cushions and Bath Mats – Certain areas of the home are very high risk for injury from falls like the bathroom. Special floor cushions and bath mats are designed to help reduce the impact from a fall and are frequently talked about in the clinical literature. These floor cushions are tri-fold in design, making them convenient to carry to areas requiring the most immediate protection. Bathrooms are also very high risk zones. The sure step bath mat can be used to significantly reduce the impact of a fall. The mat is impervious to water and bacterial growth and can be custom cut to fit the contours of any bathroom or floor.

Please go to www.MedicalNurseTraining.com for more information on these programs and devices. A consumer section with numerous new fall prevention and protection devices will appear on the site shortly. This will include significant educational resources for the non medical community. In the meantime you are welcome to email us with your immediate needs.

Author: Pat Devaney

New fall identifiers are helping to identify patients and residents at risk.  Once identified, proven technologies and education can significantly reduce risk even after discharge.  Acute Care facilities are struggling to minimize the effect of preventable falls on the facility budget.  We have included a compilation of ideas for your review on fall prevention and fall protection through online falls training coupled with new effective technologies.

This is to announce a tremendous saving in lives and medical costs of over $200 billion yearly.  Most of these savings can be achieved by reducing the risk of falls and protecting against the effect of falls particularly in the population now approaching 60 and above.  New personal use technologies that are relatively unknown to some in the medical field and more often the public, will easily eliminate these useless injuries and death.  The National Center for Patient Safety recently recommended the use of these new approaches.  We are receiving numerous requests to offer this information to the general public and we are eager to perform this public service.

The President of Medical Nurse Training, Inc.,Mr. Devaney, is available to speak to these new technologies and education for your program.  Medical Nurse Training is the premier portal for training nurses and doctors utilizing a nationally known Geriatric Doctor, the Assistant Director of Nursing at Johns Hopkins and Patrick Devaney who has over 25 years experience lecturing on these topic to tens of thousands of nurses, doctors, and healthcare facilities.  Anyone who is above the age of 55 or has a relative, who is at risk for falls, is confused or agitated, has Alzheimer’s, or presents elopement risks at home will be very interested in this new material.

Mr. Devaney’s mother died as the result of an unnecessary hip fracture.  This loss would have easily been prevented with one of these new devices or education techniques.  Numerous lives have already been saved with these clinically proven devices.

We have partnered with the leading manufacturers of these low cost medical technologies to provide these devices predominately available only through hospitals and nursing homes to the general public at an institutional price.

By going to www.MedicalNurseTraining.com you can get a broad overview of the types of programs we offer to the medical community and review our blogs.  We would welcome a discussion of how your program and listeners/viewers will greatly benefit from this information. This piece will be of interest to most, if not all. These medically sound approaches have gotten attention and will reduce government costs in the trillions of dollars over the next 10 years.  You can also review clinical references on this site.

Medical Nurse Training provides the latest on-line training to Doctors and Nurses on fall prevention and protection.  This includes in-house education on devices that will reduce injury from falls and related deaths.

Hip Protectors – High Impact – absorbing pads that help protect hip bones against injury from falls.  About 320,000 people suffer a hip fracture every year.  These pads are built into briefs, panties, sweat pants and sweat shorts.  They can easily be laundered and re-used numerous times to help protect from falls.  The use of these devices has been clinically proven to reduce injury.  Many individuals that experience a fall are afraid to continue normal activities like walking.  These devices help these people resume a normal life.  Hip Fracture is one of the leading causes of death in older individuals.  Our experience shows that hip protectors are generally not known by the general public

Fall Alarms – Inexpensive bed and chair exit electronic monitors otherwise known as Fall Alarms, assist with the observation of patients and family members to help reduce falls and the potential for elopement from home or a facility.  A variety of sensor accessories may be used including toileting sensors, bed/chair sensors, infrared sensors and self releasing sensors may be attached to the monitor to reduce risk.  These alarms include a gentle voice reminder not to get up without assistance.  Many of these devices are unknown to the general public.

Floor Cushions and Bath Mats – Certain areas of the home are a very high risk for injury from falls like the bathroom.  Special floor cushions and bath mats are designed to help reduce the impact from a fall and are frequently talked about in the clinical literature.  These floor cushions are tri-fold in design, making them convenient to carry to areas requiring the most immediate protection.  Bathrooms are also very high risk zones. The sure step bath mat can be used to significantly reduce the impact of a fall. The mat is impervious to water and bacterial growth and can be custom cut to fit the contours of any bathtub or floor.

Please go to www.MedicalNurseTraining.com for more information on these programs and devices. A consumer section with numerous new fall prevention and fall protection devices will appear on the site shortly. In the meantime you are welcome to email us with your immediate needs.

Written By:  Patrick Devaney, Author & Contributor

Facilities have been struggling with developing successful in house falls programs current with Joint Commission Goal # 9  for 2009 . This also includes updating restraint policies current to the new CMS guidelines and Bed Safety Workgroup recommendations for bed safety. Many of these regulations require a full time regulatory interpreter to disseminate these complicated tools, falls and restraint assessment recommendations. Additionally, development of new policies and protocols is costly and very time consuming.

Why reinvent the wheel? The training program from www.MedicalNurseTraining.com includes all the information any facility requires to meet all of these challenges. The program includes restraint and falls protocols from such great facilities as Johns Hopkins, with in depth training tools to implement these programs to all staff. The program also includes a significant number of policies and procedures to fit any facilities needs.

The challenge was to bring all the information a hospital or long term care facility would require into one easy to use program with DVD or On-line accredited training and downloadable resources manual. The feedback from facilities has been incredible.

“Thank you for saving us so much time and effort, we had a great survey” are typical of the comments we have received. You can check it out for yourself and see clips of the program or view videos of attendee’s testimonials. I fell very confident that this is by far the best program I have ever seen for hospital and long term care fall, restraint and patient safety.

The difficulty with many programs continues to be they are not evidence based, they are out of date, they do not focus on identification of  patients or residents at risk for falls and do not focus enough on prediction of fall. Correlating fall injury rates to a performance improvement profile is discussed in detail. Included are numerous plans of corrective action if your facility is above the national benchmark for restraints or falls.

Many times injury from fall, particularly in view of the new Medicare reimbursement changes of  October 2008, can create a huge financial burden on facilities. There are numerous devices that significantly reduce harm from falls. These may include but are not limited to fall alarms, hip protectors, floor fall cushions, seating and positioning products, self releasing devices, alternatives to side rails and high fall risk patient and resident identifiers.

Many of these patient safety devices are discussed in detail in this program relative to standard of care. For a complete review of these types of devices I would suggest going to the Posey Company at www.posey.com to see all the devices available from a leader in the fields of restraint alternatives, bed safety, fall prevention, fall protection and patient safety.

The utilization of the national database of nursing quality indicators is reviewed in detail. This will help to reduce the effect of costly negative surveys to your facility. The use and application of a variety of  fall indicator scales like Dr. Morse Scale are reviewed for current relevance and efficacy.

A complete review of current root cause analysis is also included. The top root causes for falls have changed and include patient assessment, care planning, physical environment, alarm systems and communication into an evidence based protocol. We will continue to update the program with current reviews of all the relevant material to keep your facility up to date.

Thanks for taking the time to review this weeks blog and for your concern for better patient care.

In recent years it has been very difficult to find evidence based programs for fall prevention and fall protection. I have a personal reason for my involvement in this matter since my mother passed away as a direct result of a hip fracture. This event was totally preventable utilizing the techniques implemented by some forward thinking facilities like Johns Hopkins.

Facilities have been struggling with the appropriate modalities to reduce the incidence of falls and reduce restraint use at the same time. In order to find the ultimate solution requires a mix of assessment tools and up to date devices to achieve the highest reduction in fall risk. Additionally bed safety and reductions in side rail entrapment have been serious concerns especially for older beds. I also believe, as does CMS, that one of the best answers is too provide a train the trainer approach to hospital and long term care on fall prevention, fall protection, bed safety and restraint reduction. Fall Prevention Programs work particularly well in this format since fall prevention in nursing often requires significant falls training and retraining.

I began our journey to reinvent an all inclusive, evidence based program for fall prevention including online video training with over 400 pages of resources including  DVD’s and manual. The best approach was to elicit the best speakers on these topics including the ADON at Johns Hopkins and a geriatric doctor at one of the top 100 hospitals, Dr. Deidre Carolan from Inova Health System. We teamed up and developed a train the trainer that is loaded with all the needed content. Finally,  programs that addressed on line and in house training for; Hospital Fall Prevention, Long Term Care Fall Prevention, Restraint Reduction, Fall Prevention Protocols, Falls and Restraint Assessment, Acute Care Fall Prevention and Bed Safety.  

The programs are recorded with a live audience to increase the learning and retention experience. Valuable technologies including Fall Alarms, Posey Beds, Hip Protectors, Fall Mats, Self-Releasing Devices and Restraint Alternatives are demonstrated and discussed. Reducing the impact of the new Medicare changes of October 2008 are reviewed in detail. These accredited on line training programs include all the patient/resident safety regulatory recommendations and device suggestions. Numerous tools including the new Johns Hopkins restraint, falls policies and protocols as required by the new CMS and 2009 Joint Commission recommendations. I have reviewed numerous programs and I am confident this is the most state of the art program available. Attendees report this is the best program they have ever attended for staff and nursing training.

Many regulatory guidelines are often overlooked due to lack of information from the regulating agencies.  I have had the opportunity to work with and train numerous surveyors. There has often been some inconsistency between surveyors on the guidelines. The training I have done with the surveyors has reduced some of these inconsistencies. We have included much of the lessons learned in the On Line and DVD programs in a train the trainer, video and PowerPoint format.  This will certainly help to minimize negative surveys in Long Term and Acute Care settings.

Testimonials and clips of the program can be viewed on www.MedicalNurseTraining.com/Testimonials.html/

Article is Copyrighted 2009 - Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney, BA Psychology

President and Founder, Medical Nurse Training, Inc.

Patrick has been a consultant / trainer to numerous Health Care facilities, Corporations and LTCDON Associations.  Most recently as Executive Director of a state Director Of Nurses Association Long Term Care.  He has trained thousands of LTC and Critical Care facilities as a speaker on fall prevention, bed safety and restraint alternatives in one and three hour accredited speaking engagements.  His programs have been nationally accredited by the ANA for over 12 years with excellent results.

FALL PREVENTION, BED SAFETY & RESTRAINT REDUCTION
NURSE TRAINING COURSE OUTLINE

In institutions, more than half of those with high risk factors fall every year. And one out of ten of these falls results in a serious injury. This program will help you identify risk factors for falls, both in the patient population and in the hospital environment, and it will help you take steps to prevent falls.  Falls among older patients and other-at-risk patients are very common.

OVERVIEWThis activity describes strategies and techniques for reducing / preventing falls. It is divided into the following parts.

a. Introduction

b. Nursing Home & Hospital Bed Entrapment and Hospital Bed Safety

c. Slide Program Review

d. Falls Management

PURPOSE/OVERALL GOALThe purpose of this activity is to provide nurses and others a review of strategies and techniques to minimize or prevent patient falls.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

After completing this course, the learner should be able to:

a. Define “restraints” according to Government Guidelines and Regulations.

b. Describe Fall Prevention/Protection, Protocols and New Alternatives to Restraint Products.

c. Describe indications and contraindications to various restraint and restraint free devices.

d. Describe selection strategy and authorized application techniques for restraints, postural supports, restraint alternatives, and New Bed Safety Devices as per CMS/FDA.

e. Describe in detail Hospital Bed Safety Work Group Bed requirements for safe bed environment.

f. Describe options to bed side rails as restraints.

g. Describe “Less Restrictive Alternatives” as required by JCAHO 2003, including QI Audit Documentation with special emphasis on the Joint Commission Patient Safety Goals, patient/resident family falls education and new less restrictive devices.

h. Describe and explain fall equipment, patient fall identifiers (as required by the Joint Commission) and criteria for utilization.

i. Identify root causes of patient falls and ways to prevent and protect patients.

j. Describe the training tools provided on the new CMS Restraint Regulations, including new interpretive guidelines released on 4-18-2008.

In our next post, we will talk about course options that are available for nurses to take online nurse training. We have Hospital Fall Prevention Protocols included in the package that you can take and use to modify your current protocols with. We are also one of the only few companies that offer fall prevention video training and have world class experts to teach the topics from institutions such as Johns Hopkins Hospital and Inova Health System.

To get started with our course, click here to visit Medical Nurse Training or type in www.MedicalNurseTraining.com

Expert Speaker #1:
Maria Cvach MS, BSN
Assistant Director of Nursing for Regulatory Affairs
Johns Hopkins Health System

Maria is a legal nurse consultant and a nurse education consultant.  She is co-author of the nationally recognized, Johns Hopkins Fall Risk Assessment Tool, an evidence based approach to Fall Risk Assessment, Fall Prevention and Falls Management.

Maria Cvach presents her Fall Prevention Protocols from Johns Hopkins Health System. She provides information and insights from their new evidence based falls program and helps other hospitals to have the success that Johns Hopkins has using it to reduce their Hospital Preventable Falls.

To Watch a video clip of her presentation, please visit http://www.medicalnursetraining.com/AcuteCare.html