What You Can Expect
Improved Outcomes
With the Hendrich Fall Prevention Program©, you can expect a reduction in injurious falls, and much more. Our holistic approach means that we provide the tools you need to identify the person’s intrinsic fall risk factors and create targeted care plans to address them. This approach leads to less patient harm and better overall health and mobility for patients.
The Hendrich program also fosters what we call “competency-infused practice.” The program helps you build processes, workflows, and educational paths that enable nurses to perform at top-of-license while reducing the wasted time and frustration that come with redundant, non-value-added tasks. The goal is to elevate nursing practice.
Fewer injurious falls, hospital complications, and readmissions
We have helped many of the largest health care systems across the United States achieve some of the lowest fall injury rates in the industry. By using the Hendrich program to address the root causes of a patient’s fall risk, your organization will also reduce other hospital-acquired conditions, such as delirium, pressure ulcers, loss of muscle mass, and others.
Fall-related injuries are a leading cause of 30-day readmissions, pointing to the need for a cross-continuum approach. In a large study in 2020, the Hendrich team found that more than a third of adult inpatients had multiple intrinsic fall risk factors, which clinical teams often do not manage during hospitalization. The Hendrich model can help you identify these post-discharge risks and select effective interventions for your transition plan.
Research supports the value of the Hendrich model in a cross-continuum approach
Studies by researchers at the Mayo Clinic found that inpatient fall risk scores using the Hendrich model predict post-discharge risk of 30-day readmission and death.
A recent study by a research team in Italy found the Hendrich model to be a valid predictor of falls in the six months following discharge from an orthopedic rehabilitation unit.
Improved nursing assessment and workflow
The Hendrich Fall Prevention Program empowers nurses to work more efficiently, confidently, and effectively:
- The Hendrich II Fall Risk Model® focuses the nursing assessment on the risk factors that science shows are necessary to predict and prevent most falls.
- Hendrich Cloud-Based Education© provides nurses with the orientation, skills, and knowledge to foster a practice that promotes safety.
- With EHR integration, fall risk factors and scores auto-populate from data in the record and automatically update as the patient condition changes. This improves care, nursing workflow, and reduces documentation burden.
- The Hendrich Care Plans© enable nurses to select evidence-based interventions and goals that map to a patient’s risk factors. Your organization can customize the care plans to meet the needs of your environment and evolve your program at a pace that works for your teams.
Decreased patient harm and medical liability
Hospital falls are still among the top causes of medical liability. Settlements can be large, adding unnecessary costs to health care. Many organizations have created or participate in a patient safety organization (PSO) to help protect “patient safety work product.” By analyzing serious safety events in a post-fall huddle, teams find the “true” cause of falls, especially while viewing data that show the running 12-month rate of falls and injurious falls. Once the actual causes of falls are identified, teams can close the gap by putting into place an ongoing quality and safety improvement plan.
Dr. Hendrich ran one of the largest PSOs in the country and influenced the federal guidelines. She is uniquely qualified to assist organizations as they keep patients safe and align the Hendrich Fall Program© with their own PSO processes or simply protect the data.
Competency-infused nursing practice
Nursing practice is “competency-infused” when nurses can confidently and consistently provide care that is person-centered and aligned with the highest quality evidence. Competency-infused practice emerges when processes and workflows reduce complexity and redundancy and enable nurses to perform at top-of-license.
We’ve designed all aspects of the Hendrich program to facilitate competency-infused nursing practice. For example, we’ve used the evidence-based 4M framework of Age-Friendly Health Systems—What Matters, Mentation, Medication, and Mobility—to inform our care plans.
Age-Friendly Health Systems is an initiative of The John A. Hartford Foundation and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in partnership with the American Hospital Association and the Catholic Health Association of the United States.
