Falls Prevention Safety Collaborative

Join experts from ECRI and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices PSO for a five-months long collaborative to learn how to reduce the occurrence of falls within your facility.

According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, an estimated 700,000 to 1 million people will fall each year in a hospital. Approximately 800,000 residents in nursing homes will fall yearly. Falls can have devasting consequences, including fractures, lacerations, and internal bleeding. For elderly individuals, falls can result in loss of independence, chronic pain, and reduced quality of life. Falls can also have a financial impact. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the healthcare industry spends $50 billion on nonfatal fall injuries, while fatal falls cost healthcare approximately $754 million each year for older adults alone. While efforts have been made to enhance falls prevention, patients remain at risk.

Through ECRI and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) PSO’s Falls Prevention Safety Collaborative, healthcare providers will have the opportunity to work with leading subject matter experts and other healthcare organizations to identify and implement strategies to help reduce falls. Using a total systems approach to safety, teams will learn about major contributing risks that lead to falls and the importance of creating strong action plans for prevention.

The Collaborative will be supported by the confidentiality protections under the federal Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005. As a federally listed PSO under the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), ECRI and the ISMP PSO will implement a learning system approach to disseminate patient safety best practices across the healthcare community. Through monthly evidence-based education webinars and virtual safe table discussions, participants will learn about and share information on key falls prevention and safety issues. Teams will use performance improvement tools to create their falls prevention improvement plan and share those plans with the collaborative teams in an all-teach/all-learn environment.

Falls Prevention Safety Collaborative participants will receive:

• A detailed falls prevention practices assessment report
• Guidance about how to implement recommendations
• Peer-to-peer learning and sharing via safe table discussions
• Support from ECRI’s experts in safety, risk, and quality to determine contributing factors that lead to falls and strong action plans for improvement
• Toolkit of ECRI evidence-based resources to support implementation of falls prevention safety practices

Participation timeframe

• March 2024 through July 2024

Cost

• $2,500 USD per organization for up to 5-person team
• $5,000 USD per organization for up to 10-person team
• $10,000 USD per organization for up to 30-person team

*ECRI and the ISMP PSO members receive a 10% discount

Registration for this Collaborative is now closed. Stay tuned for information about our 2025 Collaborative

Featured collaborative subject matter experts

Patricia Quigley, PhD, MPH, APRN, CRRN, FAAN, FAANP

Nurse Consultant
Dr. Patricia Quigley is both a Clinical Nurse Specialist and a Nurse Practitioner in Rehabilitation, and her contributions to patient safety, nursing, and rehabilitation are evident at a national level – with emphasis on clinical practice innovations designed to promote elders’ independence and safety. She is nationally known for her program of research in patient safety, particularly in falls prevention. For over 40 years, Dr. Quigley has practiced in the field of rehabilitation nursing, including 32.5 years with the Veterans Administration. She has served as patient safety expert for fall and injury reduction to the American Hospital Association, Washington State Hospital Association, Alaska State Hospital and Nursing Home Association, and the CMS Hospital Improvement Innovation Networks. She also served as fall and fall injury prevention subject matter expert for the 2013 AHRQ National Falls Toolkit and the 2008 and 2013 Institute for Healthcare Improvement Reducing Serious Injurious Falls on Medical Surgical Units. Dr. Quigley has served as a committee member of the NQF Patient Safety Standing Committee and past member of the NQF Patient Safety Complications Steering Committee, nominated by ANA.

Patricia Dykes, PhD, MA, RN, FAAN, FACMI

Senior Nurse Scientist and Program Director for Research, Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice and the Center for Nursing Excellence at Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Dykes and her team were funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to develop and test a web-based falls prevention toolkit. The toolkit was found to significantly reduce falls in acute care hospitals, and their study results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Dykes and her team have expanded this research and are exploring the use of technology to provide the core set of information needed by care team members (including patients) at the bedside to provide and engage in safe patient care. Dr. Dykes is currently the Partner’s healthcare site principal investigator for a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and the National Institute on Aging–funded falls prevention clinical trial. She is the author of 2 books and more than 70 peer-reviewed publications and has presented her work related to nursing informatics, clinical documentation, and patient safety both nationally and internationally. She is a member of the National Institutes of Health Biomedical Computing and Health Informatics Study Section, Center for Scientific Review, and an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and the American College of Medical Informatics.

What Leaders Are Saying About ECRI Safety Collaboratives:

I feel this collaborative had great value, enjoyed hearing how others are approaching the same issue.

It was really helpful to hear from other colleagues regarding their challenges and ideas for improvement

This collaborative was educational and enforced practical application of lessons learned.

This process was excellent and allowed our team to assess our current program and learn best practices from others.

I thought this entire project was excellent. I learned so much. The leaders appeared genuinely interested in making a difference in safety for our institutions. The resources were so valuable.