Purpose This study aimed to explore nurses’ experiences with hospitalized children’s fall accidents. The findings are intended to provide foundational data for developing strategies to strengthen patient safety for children.
Methods Participants were purposively sampled. The sample consisted of eight nurses working in the pediatric departments of hospitals located in Daegu and Seoul in South Korea. All participants had experienced at least one fall accident involving a hospitalized child within the past year. Data were collected through in-depth interviews conducted between February 1 and April 30, 2025. The collected data were analyzed using Colaizzi’s phenomenological analysis method.
Results The data analysis revealed four themes and 12 subthemes, which were derived from 111 significant statements and reflect pediatric ward nurses’ experiences with inpatient fall incidents. The four themes were: “encountering fall risks beyond nurses’ control,” “ineffective fall education and formalized safety practices,” “limitations of assessment tools and the growth of reflective practice,” and “moving toward comprehensive fall prevention and management strategies.”
Conclusion Nurses recognized that the risk of pediatric falls was often beyond their control, and that fall prevention education did not always translate into practice. Reflective analysis of fall incidents, age- and patient-specific fall nursing interventions, and the establishment of an integrated support system are needed for effective fall prevention and management. These findings are expected to provide basic data to guide nursing care that prevents fall accidents and improves children’s patient safety.
Purpose With the recent increase in interest in patient safety, prevention of falls in hospitalized children has become important. This study aimed to identify the incidence rate of falls among hospitalized children and explore fall-related characteristics.
Methods This retrospective descriptive study analyzed the medical information of 18,119 patients aged <18 years admitted to a general hospital in South Korea from electronic medical records and fall event reports between January 1, 2018, and September 30, 2023. The study variables included the general and clinical characteristics of the fall group and fall-related characteristics of the fall events. This study employed descriptive statistics and a chi-square test using IBM SPSS version 26.0.
Results Among the patients, 82 fall events were identified. Therefore, the fall incidence rate was 4.5 falls per 1,000 patients. Furthermore, a statistically significant difference was found concerning the type of injury sustained between children >1 year old and those <1 year old, and most cases had no damage or bruises. More cases were found in which falls occurred two days after hospitalization in winter and summer than on the day or the day after hospitalization, which was a statistically significant difference. In addition, fall prevalence was higher between 8 am and 4 pm, and when no caregiver was present. Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, education and interventions to prevent fall events in infants and toddlers should persist throughout hospitalization, and it is necessary to guide continuous management and observation of the caregivers.
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Age-specific differences in patient safety incidents: focus on falls and medication using the Korean patient safety incident reporting and learning system (2016–2023) Yumi Son, Mijin Lee BMC Health Services Research.2026;[Epub] CrossRef
Nurses’ experiences of children’s fall accidents in South Korea: a phenomenological study Hye Jin Kim, Hyun Young Koo Child Health Nursing Research.2026; 32(1): 39. CrossRef
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Purpose Falls are a common cause of unintentional injuries in infants. This study was conducted to examine the patterns of healthcare utilization following infant falls in South Korea.
Methods This cross-sectional descriptive study utilized an online survey designed to gather information regarding the general characteristics of parents and infants, fall-related variables, and healthcare use.
Results The most serious falls identified by parents occurred at an average infant age of 6.97 months. Most fall incidents took place indoors (95.7%), and many occurred under the supervision of caregivers (68.0%). Following the fall, 36.4% of the participants used healthcare services. Logistic regression analysis revealed that healthcare use following an infant fall was significantly associated with being a firstborn child (odds ratio [OR]=5.32, 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.19-15.28) and falling from a caregiver's arms (OR=4.22; 95% CI, 1.45-13.68).
Conclusion To prevent and decrease the frequency of infant falls, improvements are needed in both the domestic environment and parenting approaches.
Purpose To develop a fall risk assessment tool to predict fall risk in pediatric inpatients.
Methods Three tools widely used in clinical practice (Humpty Dumpty Fall Scale, General Risk Assessment for Pediatric Inpatient Falls, and Seoul National University Hospital Pediatric Fall Risk Scale) were examined, and assessment items were extracted. Employing a case-control design, 29 children who experienced falls during hospital stays were selected as the "fall" group, and a control group (93 children) was selected based on age and sex matching. The sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values of the newly developed tool ("Newfs-PI") were analyzed.
Results The Newfs-PI consisted of seven items: age, activity, history of falls, length of hospital stay, and medication. The total score ranged from 0 to 15. Its sensitivity and specificity were 62.07% and 74.19%, respectively.
Conclusion The Newfs-PI has high specificity and sensitivity, which are essential for a fall risk assessment tool that complements existing tools. These values are high relative to those of existing assessment tools and satisfy both sensitivity and specificity criteria. As the EMR enables monitoring of the components of the Newfs-PI, the tool can be used as a fall risk assessment and prevention scale for pediatric inpatients.
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Purpose This study was conducted to obtain data for the development of an effective fall risk assessment tool for pediatric inpatients through a systematic review and meta-analysis of the diagnostic test accuracy of existing scales.
Methods A literature search using Medline, Science Direct, CINAHL, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library was performed between March 1 and 31, 2018. Of 890 identified papers, 10 were selected for review. Nine were used in the meta-analysis. Stata version 14.0 was used to create forest plots of sensitivity and specificity. A summary receiver operating characteristic curve was used to compare all diagnostic test accuracies.
Results Four studies used the Humpty Dumpty Falls Scale. The most common items included the patient's diagnoses, use of sedative medications, and mobility. The pooled sensitivity and specificity of the nine studies were .79 and .36, respectively.
Conclusion Considering the low specificity of the pediatric fall risk assessment scales currently available, there is a need to subdivide scoring categories and to minimize items that are evaluated using nurses' subjective judgment alone. Fall risk assessment scales should be incorporated into the electronic medical record system and an automated scoring system should be developed.
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PURPOSE This study was conducted to identify risk factors in hospitalized children, and to develop and validate a fall-risk assessment tool for hospitalized children. METHODS A retrospective chart review was performed at one university children's hospital, and an analysis was done of the characteristics of all patients who fell during a 44-month period (n=48). These patients were compared with another 149 hospitalized children who did not fall. RESULTS Significant predictors of falls as identified in a multivariate logistic regression analyses were age of less than 3 years old, neurological diagnosis including epilepsy, children's dependency of ADL, physical developmental delay, multiple usage of fall-risk-increasing drugs. The respective odds ratios ranged from 2.4 to 7.1 with 95% confidence interval (p<0.05). Accordingly, defining patients with either 5 risk factors as fall-prone hospitalized children provided a sensitivity of 93.6% and specificity of 16.2%. CONCLUSION The results show that this tool has an acceptable level of sensitivity to assess the risk factors of fall in hospitalized children even though the specificity was low, suggesting that this tool may enable nurses to predict the risk level of childhood falls, and develop preventive strategies against pediatric falls in children's units.
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