Huddle Board on Preventing Patient Falls

Purpose of the Huddle Board
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Research indicates that nearly 30 percent of admitted patients fall every year and that almost 25 percent of these falls lead to injuries and associated increases in healthcare costs (Jones et al., 2019). Severe fall-associated injuries are conceptualized as preventable healthcare-associated conditions. Falls within hospital premises are classified as an increasingly complex and "wicked" issue. Wicked problems encompass context-dependent undesirable events that normally do not have clear answers. Patient falls prove a multifaceted issue since they emanate from environmental (for example, slippery floor), personal (for example, inferior extremity weakness), and system variables. Systems factors contributing to persistent patient falls entail the attitude that the event is inevitable, the inability to derive crucial lessons from previous falls, and poor teamwork. This paper discusses the purpose of the huddle board, especially when creating plans tailored to prevent patient falls.
The huddle board helps create a culture of patient safety within the system. Safety culture depicts the lessons and shared assumptions, behaviors, values, and beliefs that staff have concerning their organization's preparedness to detect and learn from mistakes. A huddle is an instrument for sharing changes in a care plan that are necessary because of patient status changes (for example, a fall) or due to the ineffectiveness of the current program (interventions that fail to mitigate a fall). Post-event team meetings can be conceptualized as a huddle, especially in healthcare. A huddle allows for sense-making and learning from the patient falls, which is central to healthcare practice and education. A huddle augments participants' skills and knowledge about the event and thus augments patient outcomes (Jones et al., 2019). Research indicates that communication failures among hospital staff significantly contribute to patient harm (Shaikh, 2020). The huddle board helps mitigate the potential of a fall and thus improves clinician satisfaction, provides non-technical as well as technical support, and fosters patient outcomes in the short run (Ore et al., 2019).
Accordingly, the huddle board constitutes a sense-making construct of the evidence-driven risk mitig...