Reference no: EM132361707

Question

Suppose you are considering tracking patient falls. If you track only the raw number of patient falls, you may not be able to compare fall rates accurately. Since the number of patients per night may fluctuate and the type of patient may be different from day to day, how may you consider standardizing falls for comparison purposes.

For the sake of illustration, let's assume there are 20 patient rooms on the floor, with 30 days in the month. Let's assume each room is occupied throughout the month That would be 600 patient nights for the month at full capacity. Assume there were 10 patient falls that month.

Now let's consider the same floor of 20 patient rooms and a month with 30 days. However, the average occupancy for the month was 15 rooms over the month. There were 8 patient falls recorded that month.

During this second month, we witnessed fewer patient falls. However, was the rate of patient falls less for the second month? Why?