Refining and psychometric evaluation of the falling risk assessment tool in ophthalmology inpatients.
Muling Li, Chunmei Li, Qinghui Huang and 5 others
PMID 37458186WHAT IT FOUND
A new eye-inpatient fall-risk tool was rated similarly by trained nurses and its items were judged relevant by experts, but the study did not show it prevents falls or identifies who will fall.
Key findings
01The refined FRAT retained 12 items after item screening.
02Raters' total scores were very similar, with agreement of 0.970, and expert item relevance scores ranged from 0.75 to 1.00 with overall agreement 0.95.
03The tool was not tested for whether it predicts actual falls, and future studies are needed.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The sample came from one tertiary hospital in Guangzhou, China, and was recruited by convenience sampling, so results may not apply to other hospitals or countries. The factor structure was not checked in a separate independent sample. Criterion validity and known-group validity were not tested. The study did not test sensitivity, specificity or predictive validity against actual falls. Interrater testing used only 20 participants who were not part of the main 730-person sample. Several items were deleted because they scored zero or were uncommon in this sample, including infusion, dressing, self-competence, cognition, anaemia history and double vision. The initial tool had 18 items, but the final 12-item version was not tested against patients' actual fall outcomes.
Declared interests
The authors developed the tool; funding was provided by the Medical Scientific Research Foundation of Guangdong, China (No. B2022078). The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the high expert agreement and nurse scoring agreement as proof that this tool prevents falls. It was tested only for measurement properties in one Chinese ophthalmology inpatient sample, and its ability to predict actual falls was not evaluated.