An Assessment of the Nurses’ Knowledge and Practices of Inpatient Fall Prevention

Purposes: We conducted a cross-sectional descriptive study to evaluate the knowledge and practices of fall prevention among nurses in four departments in 7A Military Hospital, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Subjects and methods: Sixty-two nurses in four departments were chosen to fulfill pre-designed questionnaires, and their daily fall preventive practices were observed.   Results: There were 40.3% of nurses achieve good knowledge of fall prevention. In practice, 22.5% of nurses had proper compliance, and 77.4% had not. 82.3% of nurses claimed to update fall prevention knowledge often, and 87.1% demanded training for fall prevention. Nurses in the surgical department group had more knowledge of fall prevention than nurses in the internal medicine group of departments (68.7% vs. 10.0%, p<0.05). Female nurses had higher fall risk compliances than males (78.3% vs. 37.5%, P<0.05). Conclusion: Training for nurses in fall preventive knowledge and practices are needed in 7A Military Hospital. Keywords: fall preventive; nurses; questionnaires; risk compliances.