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Citation
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Siegwart J, Spennato U, Lerjen N, Mueller B, Schuetz P, Koch D, Struja T. Geriatrics (Basel) 2023; 8(3). |
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Abstract
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BACKGROUND: Harmful in-hospital falls with subsequent injuries often cause longer stays and subsequently higher costs. Early identification of fall risk may help in establishing preventive strategies.
OBJECTIVE: To assess the predictive ability of different clinical scores including the Post-acute care discharge (PACD) score and nutritional risk screening score (NRS), and to develop a new fall risk score (FallRS).
METHODS: A retrospective cohort study of medical in-patients of a Swiss tertiary care hospital from January 2016 to March 2022. We tested the ability of the PACD score, NRS and FallRS to predict a fall by using the area under curve (AUC). Adult patients with a length of stay of ≥ 2 days were eligible.
RESULTS: We included 19,270 admissions (43% females; median age, 71) of which 528 admissions (2.74%) had at least one fall during the hospital stay. The AUC varied between 0.61 (95% confidence interval (CI), 0.55-0.66) for the NRS and 0.69 (95% CI, 0.64-0.75) for the PACD score. The combined FallRS score had a slightly better AUC of 0.70 (95% CI, 0.65-0.75) but was more laborious to compute than the two other scores. At a cutoff of 13 points, the FallRS had a specificity of 77% and a sensitivity of 49% in predicting falls.
CONCLUSIONS: We found that the scores focusing on different aspects of clinical care predicted the risk of falls with fair accuracy. A reliable score with which to predict falls could help in establishing preventive strategies for reducing in-hospital falls. Whether or not the scores presented have better predictive ability than more specific fall scores do will need to be validated in a prospective study.
Language: en |