Staff Education on Preventing Benzodiazepines Related Falls in Older Adults

In geriatric psychiatric setting, falls rates are higher than general wards and could reach up to 13-25 falls per 1000 hospital days. High use of benzodiazepines in older adults is a major cause of increased falls despite recommendations to avoid its prescription to the population. This DNP staff education project focused on training nurses working in an 80 bed capacity geriatric psychiatric facility on best evidence based practice of preventing falls associated with use of BZDs. The identified practice issue was knowledge deficit on evidence based best practices to prevent falls in older adults under BZDs medications. The project aims at answering the practice focused question, In nurses caring for elderly patients taking BZDs, does implementation of staff education reduce the rates of falls in the patient population? To develop staff education program, ADDIE model was applied for instructional design, PDSA cycle for change implementation and CDC STEADI clinical guidelines to inform interventions for fall prevention in older adults. Eight nurses in the facility underwent the staff training and pre-and post-test applied to evaluate knowledge gain on preventing falls related BZDs in older adults. The relationship between staff education and falls outcomes in patients was analyzed using correlation coefficient and paired t-test for knowledge assessment. The post-test scores of the staff increased by an average of 19% a statistically significant improvement(p