NR 449 Week 3 Assignment_RUA_Hourly Rounding & Patient Fall Prevention in Acute Care

Hourly Rounding to Prevent Patient Falls in Acute Care Settings Patient falls are among the most frequent and preventable safety incidents in hospitals. These events can result in serious injuries, longer stays, higher costs, and reduced patient satisfaction. Nurses are central to fall prevention because of their constant presence and direct care responsibilities. One widely adopted strategy is scheduled hourly rounding, where nurses proactively check on patients to meet needs, assist with mobility, and ensure safety. This approach aims to reduce unsupervised movement and fall risk. Gliner et al. (2022) found a 21 percent reduction in fall rates in facilities using hourly rounding, highlighting its effectiveness. This paper examines the link between hourly rounding and fall prevention using two primary research articles. Clinical Question The clinical question guiding this research is: In hospitalized adults, how does the use of scheduled hourly rounding compared to standard care without structured rounding affect the rate of patient falls during hospital stays? This question is structured using the PICOT format. The population of interest includes hospitalized adult patients. The intervention is scheduled hourly rounding performed by nurses. The comparison group includes patients receiving standard care without formal or consistent rounding protocols. The outcome being measured is the number of patient falls that occur during hospitalization. The timeframe is the duration of the hospital stay. This clinical question is relevant to nursing practice because it focuses on a routine nursing task that could significantly reduce preventable harm. Fall prevention has long been a concern in hospital settings, and structured rounding is a strategy that may improve outcomes without requiring complex technology or major financial investment. Nurses already perform many of using the EBSCOhost and PubMed databases. I used search terms such as “hourly rounding,” “fall prevention,” “nursing interventions,” and “hospitalized adults.” Boolean operators like “AND” and “OR” were used to combine keywords and broaden the search while still keeping the results focused on the clinical question. I applied filters to show only full-text articles that were peer-reviewed and published between 2020 and 2025. After reviewing several abstracts, I selected two articles that directly addressed the relationship between hourly rounding and patient fall rates. The Sun et al. (2020) study offered detailed observational data from medical-surgical units in four hospitals, while the Gliner et al. (2022) study provided national-level data from a variety of military hospitals. Both articles included original data, were recent, and matched the focus of my PICOT question. They also included clear descriptions of their methods and results, which made them useful and relevant for evaluating this nursing intervention. Relevant Articles The first article by Sun et al. (2020) was published in the Journal of Nursing Administration. This study aimed to evaluate how frequently bedside shift reports and hourly rounding occurred and whether these practices had any relationship to patient fall rates. Researchers collected over nine thousand observations of nursing care tasks across four different hospitals. While the analysis showed that nurse interactions were not significantly associated with a reduction in falls, the