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.

Decreasing Opioid Utilization in Rehabilitation Patients Using a Clinical Nurse Specialist Pain Consultant Program.

Objective: To investigate whether access to a clinical nurse specialist (CNS) with expertise in pain management will result in more rapid decline in opioid use across the rehabilitation hospitalization.

Design: Retrospective chart review of patients discharged during 6 months prior to and 6 months after introduction of the CNS role.

Setting: Not-for-profit 98-bed community inpatient rehabilitation hospital.