Highlights
- •Falls tend to occur in the presence of a parent-caregiver, yet their perspectives on fall risk are often not considered or incorporated into routine messaging about falls prevention in pediatric care settings.
- •Evidence indicates that health behaviors and responses to health advice are strongly influenced by parent mental representations of illness which also include their children’s unique identities.
- •Falls prevention education in pediatrics should be individualized, sensitive to what parent-caregivers already know and understand about their children's health and risk and differentiated based on the age of the child.
Abstract
Purpose
To explore how parents understand their children's falls during hospitalization and
how they perceive hospital interventions and messaging related to fall risk and prevention.
Design and methods
Semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore parent-caregiver descriptions
of their children's falls during hospitalization. Prospective purposive sampling was
used to identify eligible participants. Interviews were conducted with the parent-caregiver
who was present at the time of the fall event. Themes were coded both inductively
and deductively using a constant comparative method.
Results
Twelve parent-child groupings participated. Three themes emerged: parental knowledge
of risk, parent sense of threat to the identity of the child, and age differences
in perception of level of controllability of risk.
Conclusions
Falls prevention education is usually delivered as a straightforward presentation
of generic factual information about risk factors, with the assumption that families
need more information. Findings from this study challenge this approach. This study
indicates that parent-caregivers have fairly high levels of knowledge about children's
fall risks; parent-caregiver beliefs about the controllability of falls may differ
based on age of the child; finally, as has been found in previous studies of adult
falls, parent-caregivers may perceive hospital falls prevention measures as a source
of potential threat to their child’'s already vulnerable social identity.
Practice implications
Involving the parent-caregiver in the fall risk assessment and collaborative development
of falls prevention interventions may increase family alliance with health advice
and reduce the incidence of falls in hospitalized children.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: September 06, 2022
Accepted:
August 7,
2022
Received in revised form:
July 31,
2022
Received:
May 3,
2022
Identification
Copyright
© 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
