In hospitals, patients and medical personnel face numerous safety issues, including diagnostic and blood testing errors, postoperative complications, infections, and high mortality and readmission rates. The present essay focuses on such a safety issue as injuries of older adults caused by falls. An accidental fall might lead broken bones, brain concussions, nerve damages, and even death. Falls commonly happen because of the poor health conditions of elderly patients who cannot see well, experience difficulties with balancing and walking, take sedative medications, and have to move in a room with a slippery floor or broken stairs (LeLaurin and Shorr, 2019). Fortunately, nurses can minimize the probability of a patients fall. Therefore, the analysis of credible sources that contain evidence-based practices is an excellent way to discover what nurses could do to prevent their wards from fall. The present essay employs the Stetler Model of evidence-based practice to address the described safety issue because it shows how to get practical benefits from research findings (Stetler, 2001). The current paper also discusses the criteria that should be considered when determining the credibility of information sources and provides an example of credible sources related to the aforementioned safety issue.
The credibility of resources is determined by the several criteria. The most important ones are timeliness, objectivity, authority, and target audience (Tenopir et al., 2016). Firstly, since scientific progress does not stand still, outdated articles might fail to reflect reality and be one-sided. Secondly, scholarly papers and articles posted on websites should be unbiased (Tenopir et al., 2016). For example, if a study that concludes that excessive sugar consumption does not harm health was sponsored by a producer of fizzy drinks, it could not be counted as objective and, hence, credible. Thirdly, the authors of the paper should be trustworthy (Tenopir et al., 2016). Finally, a person who is intended to use a scholarly paper or an article on the Internet should be sure that he or she is its target audience (Tenopir et al., 2016). In other words, a student or a professor cannot refer to a paper that was written for schoolchildren.
There are numerous research papers dedicated to the examination of the chosen safety issue. The study of Hollinghurst et al. (2018) evaluates the effectiveness of various ways to protect older people from falling. The findings of this paper are based on the longitudinal analysis of approximately 120,000 elderly patients (Hollinghurst et al., 2018). This source is credible because it was peer-reviewed, published two years ago, and provides conclusions confirmed by population observations. The same logic explains the credibility of the studies of Gill et al. (2016) and Hanger (2017). Gill et al. (2016) analyze “1634 sedentary adults aged 70-89 years” to tell whether physical activity minimizes the frequency of accidental falls (p. 1). In the case of the second article, the final recommendations are based on the investigation of the wards of the Subacute Older Persons Health (Hanger, 2017). The evidence-based research paper written by Bye, Bogstrand, and Rossow (2021) is another example of a credible source because it fits all the previously mentioned criteria. Although this paper does not provide any information on reducing the frequency of falls, it informs the audience of the reasons for such accidents.
The acronym EBP stands for evidence-based practice. In other words, EBP is an approach used by healthcare specialists to make clinical decisions (Weber and Rajendran, 2018). It is necessary to incorporate credible evidence into an EBP model utilized to take a safety issue because it is an efficient way to find a decent solution. The decision-makers in a hospital could regard a credible article as a guide to action and a guarantee that the chosen solution will bring positive results. Non-credible sources could not be viewed as guarantors of a solutions quality.
Bye, E. K., Bogstrand, S. T., & Rossow, I. (2021). The importance of alcohol in elderly’s hospital admissions for fall injuries: A population case-control study. Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 1-12.
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