Do No Harm: A Multifactorial Approach to Preventing Emergency Department Falls-A Quality Improvement Project.

Introduction: Patient falls in the emergency department are a unique patient safety issue because of the often challenging nature of the environment. As there are a variety of potential causative factors for patient falls in the emergency department, this project employed a multifactorial approach to prevent patient falls in a Level 1 trauma center emergency department (adult only) in an urban tertiary care teaching hospital.

Methods: This project was a single-unit quality improvement intervention that compared postintervention monthly unit-level data to historic monthly rates on the same unit.