When selecting evidence and interventions for addressing certain healthcare issues, much attention should be paid to the quality of sources of information. Scholarly articles are more preferable in this case in comparison to articles located on websites. The purpose of this paper is to discuss credible evidence that is selected according to specific criteria in order to address such a safety issue as patients’ falls in hospitals.
Safety Issue
The personal practice experience indicates that one of the key safety issues that need to be resolved in healthcare settings is the problem of falling among adult patients. Adults’ falls are highly prevalent in hospitals, leading to many traumas and even mortality in patients, and risks are high for older patients (Tsuda, 2017). Despite much research on this issue, practitioners are still unsure regarding the best practices to use to prevent patients’ falls in hospitals. Therefore, the application of the evidence-based approach is always beneficial for healthcare providers as they can apply the best practices identified for the area.
Criteria for Determining Credibility of Resources
When determining the credibility of different types of sources, including academic articles and websites, it is necessary to focus on certain criteria. These criteria include authority, currency, accuracy, relevance, and objectivity. Thus, it is important to ensure that the source is written by a specialist in the area; the source is published within the past five years. Information presented in the article should be accurate, and the peer-review process is important for scholarly works. Content needs to be relevant and include only factual and credible data on the topic. Objectivity is important to be noted because a paper needs to be free of bias. These criteria work for website and academic articles, but in the field of scholarly writing, much attention is also paid to peer-reviewing. Furthermore, journal articles have a specific logical structure, and their quality is assessed according to the levels of evidence (Ingham-Broomfield, 2016). Thus, the results of randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews are prioritized when selecting evidence.
Credibility and Relevance of Sources on Patients’ Falls
All the sources that were selected to provide evidence-based practice solutions to the problem of patients’ falls are of high quality and credible; they were published within the past five years. Thus, Tsuda (2017) provided a high-level systematic review on fall prevention interventions. The article by Wongrakpanich et al. (2019) presented the results of the quantitative practice improvement project oriented toward decreasing the risk of falling for patients with the help of the “stop-falling” checklist. Kinoshita et al. (2019) conducted a quantitative randomized controlled study to determine the role of the medical staff in preventing patients’ falls. All these high-quality articles include evidence-based information on the most effective practices for preventing falls in adult patients.
Importance of Incorporating Credible Evidence into an EBP Model
The evidence-based practice (EBP) model requires the inclusion of the most effective practices and interventions that can be used by practitioners to address certain healthcare issues. For the problem of preventing patients’ falls in hospitals, there are many evidence-based practices used by medical workers. However, the latest studies indicate that some of these techniques are more effective than others. If these studies are randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews, their results are more important for practitioners than data presented in general reviews. Therefore, it is important to incorporate high-level and credible studies into the EBP model for improving daily medical practices because the data presented in these sources are scientific and relevant.
Conclusion
The provided analysis indicates that not all sources of information can serve as sources of evidence-based approaches to address the issue of adult patients’ falls. All sources need to be evaluated according to specific criteria to guarantee their credibility and quality. For academic articles, there are also levels of evidence that need to be considered by academicians and practitioners when selecting articles. Only high-quality sources need to be included in the EBP model to address the problem of patients’ falls.
References
Ingham-Broomfield, J. R. (2016). A nurses’ guide to the hierarchy of research designs and evidence. Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing, 33(3), 38-45.
Kinoshita, M., Takeda, H., Yamada, C., Kumagai, T., Kakamu, T., Hidaka, T., Masuishi, Y., Endo, S., Hashimoto, S., & Fukushima, T. (2019). Characteristics of awareness and behavior of medical staff for prevention of falling accidents among inpatients. Fukushima Journal of Medical Science, 65(1), 13-23.
Tsuda, T. (2017). Epidemiology of fragility fractures and fall prevention in the elderly: A systematic review of the literature. Current Orthopaedic Practice, 28(6), 580-590.
Wongrakpanich, S., Danji, K., Lipsitz, L., & Berry, S. (2019). Stop-falling: A simple checklist tool for fall prevention in a nursing facility. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 20(7), 916-918.