Identifying protective and risk factors for injurious falls in patients hospitalized for acute care: a retrospective case-control study

Inpatient falls are the most commonly reported adverse hospital event [1] and are associated with an increase in length of stay and a higher rate of patients being discharged to long-term care facilities. Inpatients who suffer an injurious fall incur significant costs and have increased morbidity compared with patients who do not fall [2].

Falls prevention and injury reduction is an active topic of research, with focus on preventative interventions and on risk factor identification or assessment. Randomized-controlled trials implemented to test interventions on fall prevention and injury reduction in many health care settings have been inconsistently successful [3]. A Cochrane review published on fall prevention in hospitals found that, of the interventions explored, only patient education in patients who were cognitively intact was statistically significant and consistently supported in the data, [3] and a later multi-center trial also demonstrated this [4]. In long-term care facilities and subacute wards, Vitamin D supplementation and interventions targeting specific risk factors on a case-by-case basis were consistently effective [3]. Other interventions investigated, including staff training, exercise programs, medication review and reorganization of care are inconsistently effective [3]. The differences between each study could suggest that hospitals have different strengths and weaknesses in the care provided to patients, and that when the data is pooled, the population differences specific to each study may be masked. In this context, risk factor identification is useful so that hospitals can review their own practices and change standard operating procedure to tailor to their patient population’s needs.

Many researchers have hoped to develop a useful risk assessment tool to identify patients who are at risk for injurious falls. The well-renowned and influential Institute of Health Improvement in the United States has recommended the use of the ABCs (Age > 85, Bones-orthopedic conditions, anti-Coagulation and recent surgery) to identify patients at risk to injure themselves in a fall; to date, there is no evidence to support this practice [5]. Other studies in the past have not supported the use of another risk-assessment, the STRATIFY tool, due to its low predictive value [6]. There is some new hope that a combination of the STRATIFY and FRAX bone health assessment could hold some utility and identifies injurious fallers more reliably [7], but it is still unknown if the positive predictive value is high enough to be cost-effective. Without the right clinical context, these risk assessment tools are overly sensitive and subsequently can result in time-intensive, costly, and often unsustainable interventions without real reductions in falls [6]. High-effort and low-yield interventions can lead to nursing burn-out as nurses perceive their efforts to prevent injuries do not make a difference.

Previous research has clearly elucidated patient risk factors for falling [8, 9] and the features of a hospital or a fall that lead to injurious falls [10, 11], but little research has been conducted on identifying patient risk factors for injurious fall during an acute hospitalization. Prior studies attempting to identify features of these people who are injured in a fall have suffered from insufficient sample size, [12] insufficiently robust control groups, [8, 13, 14] use of data of uncertain quality collected from adverse event tracking systems without corroboration from the medical record, [13‐15] and a lack of consensus in defining injurious falls [16]. The NICE guidelines collected robust epidemiological data on risk factors for falls, but used data from long-term care facilities and the community [17]. A Cochrane review similarly focused on long-term care facilities [3]. Acute care hospital falls are different in several key ways, in that patients are in a new and unfamiliar environment, have an acute change in their functional status and are especially prone to delirium. It is difficult to extrapolate the research done in other settings to the unique experience of a hospitalization; but risk factor identification for in-hospital injurious falls is paramount to future investigations and intervention design so that best-care practices can be designed. One of the biggest successes in the field of in-hospital falls was a study that identified delirium as an independent risk factor, and as a result, the Hospital Elders Life Program (HELP) was formed to develop better and safer ways to care for delirious patients [18]. After its implementation, falls were reduced by two-thirds and the practices used were then implemented nationally in the United States, demonstrating the utility of evidence-based intervention design [18]. If we understand which patients are likely to injure themselves in a fall and which ones are not while admitted to the hospital, we will be able to more appropriately target hospital fall prevention resources.

Our goal was to identify predictors of injurious falls in acutely hospitalized adults by conducting a retrospective case-control study. To study the predictors of injurious fall, we compared hospitalized patients who had a fall resulting in injury (cases) to hospitalized patients who did not have an injurious fall (control) in a retrospective case-control study. We chose to utilize a case-control study design as serious injurious falls are rare, but the exposures leading to the outcome are common.

Injurious inpatient falls are all too frequent events that lead to significant morbidity and mortality and increased healthcare costs. Because of this, there has been significant attention given to identifying patients likely to fall or to injure themselves in a fall as a fall prevention strategy. This retrospective case-control study suggests that the ABCs alone as a risk-assessment tool lack the predictive power necessary to identify inpatients at moderate or severe risk of injuring themselves in a fall, despite its recommended use by the Institutes of Health Improvements and adoption widely within the United States. While risk assessments for fall prevention are controversial [22], other clinical risk factors may be more successful in predicting injurious fall and developing more targeted interventions.

The male sex, history of a fall, history of a joint replacement, and use of psychotropic agents were significant risk factors in multivariate analysis. The correlation between being male and an increased risk of falls has recently been described by Toyabe et al. [7]. History of falling is known to predict future falls in the inpatient setting [23, 24]. Our study demonstrates that those who have fallen before are at high risk of injury when they fall again. A fall history should be documented upon admission to the hospital and fallers should be offered special precautions to prevent future injuries. History of joint replacement is a known risk factor for persistent gait disturbance [25, 26] and gait disturbance is a known risk factor for inpatient falls [27]. In our study, joint replacement could be a proxy for persistent gait disturbance.

Cognitive impairment, defined as a documented history of delirium, dementia or other cognitive impairment, was not a significant risk factor in our analysis, although it has been described in other studies [18]. It is possible that investigation of this important limitation on cognition in our study was limited by underreporting of this information, as chart review was the primary modality of data collection. It is also possible that recent adoption of better care practices for cognitively impaired patients, such as the widespread understanding and implementation of practices promoted by the HELP study, has led to a decrease in the importance of this factor as a risk factor. Use of psychotropic agents, including use of multiple agents and multiple classes of drugs, was significantly associated with injury. These drugs have significant movement-related side effects, including ataxia and bradykinesia, which could lead to imbalance, inability to compensate, and a fall resulting in injury. Interestingly, not only was there more use of these agents by injured fallers, the polypharmacy of such agents was significant. Combining multiple drugs and multiple classes of drugs is known in many instances to increase bioavailability of drug [28] and lead to a synergistic potentiation of side effects [29, 30] predisposing polypharmacy users to injurious fall. Our study adds further evidence to the argument that psychotropic agents should be used with caution. Further, the strength of this association argues that use of psychotropic agents, and especially multiple agents and multiple classes of agents, should be considered a risk factor for injurious fall.

In the present study, history of recent surgery was a significant protective factor. This has not been described previously. In collecting a larger sample size and selecting a new population of controls (no falls versus non-injurious falls), our study was better able to avoid type II error and uncover this correlation. The protective effect of recent surgery may be due to differences in how a surgical patient’s toileting is managed. Toileting is the most common activity linked to injurious falling in our study, implicated in 43.6% of documented falls, and is known to lead to falls with injury in other studies as well [31]. Patients who have recently undergone surgery are more likely to toilet while in bed, either using bed pan or urinary catheter [7]. Perhaps this finding can offer guidance on future fall prevention strategies. If in-bed toileting is indeed the reason for less falls after a surgery, we can optimize toileting practices for at-risk patients, such as those with joint replacements, history of falls or receiving a risky medication.

The injured fallers in our study were like those found in hospitals across the country. The demographics of injured fallers, circumstances of injurious fall, severity of injury sustained after inpatient fall, and types of injuries sustained after inpatient falls were similar to those found in other studies [12, 14, 15, 31, 32]. Our findings differ from other studies of injured fallers because our control group varied significantly from those of other studies. Other published studies [12, 14, 15, 31, 32] use non-injured fallers as a control group. While this group is easier to identify than finding matched inpatient non-fallers, to truly identify patients at risk to injure themselves in a fall, the control group must represent all those at risk to injure themselves in a fall – all inpatients – not patients who do not injure themselves in a fall. We believe the differences in our findings results from our choice of control group. Because of this, our study had more sensitivity to find statistically significant risk factors than other case-control studies conducted previously.

Our study has several limitations. First, our study was performed at a single academic medical center in the United States and included acutely ill patients from both medical and surgical inpatient units. Our conclusions may not be generalizable to other hospitals with different patient demographics. Fall prevention strategies differ from institution to institution and country to country. Risk factors for injurious fall may also differ according to fall prevention strategies in place, limiting the generalizability of our findings, though as described in methods above we included all possible risk factors for falls that were available in our data in the conducted analysis. Studies at other institutions, using matched non-falling controls, should be performed to validate our work. Second, we relied on the adverse event tracking system to identify cases and therefore may have missed some injurious falls. However, prior studies have demonstrated that falls, especially falls with injury, are accurately reported through such hospital-mandated systems, and in analyzing injurious falls, and omitting non-injurious falls, we maximized the opportunity that our system appropriately captured events. Third, while we attempted to identify controls with characteristics not associated with falls (date of admission and length of stay prior to fall), such a process can select controls with similar characteristics to cases, potentially over-representing high risk patients within the control group. Additionally, while we collected data on variable found to be predictive of falls and fall-related injury in the literature, we cannot rule out the potential that these risk and protective factors are confounders related to an as yet-to-be-discovered underlying factor. Finally, while our enrollment was larger than most published studies of injured fallers, our small sample size may have put us at risk of type II errors. More research is needed to generalize our results and further clarify risk and protective factors for injurious fall.

Understanding risk factors that predispose patients to injure themselves in a fall in the hospital is crucial to implementing evidence-based and resource-efficient interventions aimed at preventing such events. Age and anti-coagulation, while theoretically appealing as risk factors for an injurious fall, were similar in injurious fallers and controls, and so were not useful in identifying in-hospital fallers. Our study did find statistically more frequent falls in patients who are male, have a history of falls, have had joint replacements, and were given psychotropic drugs. Conversely, recent surgery was protective in this study, which was a novel finding, and could suggest a role for more in-bed toileting for patients with a history of falls, or other risk factors.

The key to preventing injuries from falls is not merely to identify those individuals at risk for falling, but to identify those at risk for injury. Research focused on identifying patients at high-risk to fall has not prevented injuries from falls [33‐35]. If equal attention is given to identifying patients at high-risk of injurious falls and creating tools to assess risk of injurious falls, we might reduce hospital fall injuries by targeting this smaller group of patients. This study provides the first evidence-based, patient-specific factors to identify those at risk for injury from falling while hospitalized.