This study is a quasi-experiment with a nonequivalent control group non-synchronized design, intended to identify the effect of fall prevention educational programs on the related knowledge, attitude, and self-efficacy of nurses working in Comprehensi...
This study is a quasi-experiment with a nonequivalent control group non-synchronized design, intended to identify the effect of fall prevention educational programs on the related knowledge, attitude, and self-efficacy of nurses working in Comprehensive Nursing Care Unit at general hospital.
It targeted a total of 40 nurses as the subjects, consisting of 20 nurses each from the control and experimental groups, working at the general hospital in Seoul. The data were collected from March to April 2017 after the study was approved by IRB; then, it the pre- and post-surveys of the control group, the pre-survey of the experimental group, its actual experiment, and the post-survey.
In the present study, interviews have been conducted with three nurses who are currently working in nursing and care service units, one head nurse with more than 20 years of experience, and two nurses with more than 10 years of experience in order to study their educational needs. Additionally, the fall prevention educational program was developed after considering common recommendations suggested by both domestic and international fall prevention and management guidelines.
This preliminary program went through three feasibility tests, and in its third test, it was transformed into the actual educational program. The program’s main substance included the definition of elderly falls; causes (endogenous, exogenous, environmental, and psychological); drugs or diseases causing falls; results; evidence-based nursing assessment for elderly falls; and strategies to name a few.
Researchers used as their research tools knowledge and attitude toward falls as developed by Kim Cheol-gyu, and in this study, they adopted every knowledge questionnaire among those tools except for unclear ones. They also used the Korean version of the which Eom Ji-yeon and Cheong Deok-yu (2014) translated SEPF (Dykes at al., 2011) in Korean.
In this study, the collected data were analyzed by using the SPSS/WIN 21.0 program, descriptive statistics of real numbers, percentage, mean, standard deviation, chi-square test, Shapiro-Wilk, independent t-test, and Two way repeated measures ANOVA.
The results can be summarized as follows:
As nurses learned more about elderly falls after going through the prevention program than they did before, hypothesis 1, “the experimental group who engaged in the fall prevention education will have higher score in falls than the control group,” was confirmed (F=189.030, p<.001).
Nurses’ attitude towards falls was improved after they experienced the prevention program, supporting hypothesis 2, “the experimental group who joined the fall prevention educational program will earn a higher score in their attitude towards than the control group” (F=761.743, p=.003).
The self-efficacy on fall prevention also increased after nurses participated in the fall prevention educational program, supporting hypothesis 3, “the experimental group joining the fall prevention educational program will get a higher score in self-efficacy than the control group” (F=188.503, p=.002).
Consequently, the prevention program designed in this research was proven to be an effective intervention, improving the related knowledge, attitude, and self-efficacy of nurses working for the elderly in Comprehensive Nursing Care Units at general hospital. Therefore, it would be possible for them to utilize the result of this study as a basis for their clinical practice in the hospital.
Keywords: nursing and care service unit, falls, fall prevention educational program