Validation of the STRATIFY Falls Risk Assessment Tool in a Japanese Acute Care Hospital Setting

Patient falls are the most frequent adverse events that occur in a hospital. Prevention of inpatient falls is performed by a strategy to target patients at high risk for falls determined by a falls risk assessment system such as the STRATIFY tool. However, the performance of the STRATIFY tool in a Japanese hospital setting has not been determined. We tried to verify the performance of the STRATIFY tool for predicting falls in acutely hospitalized patients in Japan by a multi-center study. A total of 113,413 patients admitted to four acute cares national university hospitals during the period from April 2010 to March 2012 were studied. Inpatient falls per 1,000 patient-days varied from 1.42 to 2.92 in the four hospitals. The STRATIFY score was calculated on the basis of data extracted electronically from the hospital information system. Although the distribution of STRATIFY scores differed significantly among the four hospitals, logistic regression analysis and survival analysis showed that the proportion of high-risk patients who fell was significantly larger than the proportion of low-risk patients in all of the four hospitals. The odds ratio and hazard ratio for high-risk patients versus low-risk patients were 2.5 to 4.3 (combined estimate, 3.9 (95% confidence interval (95% CI), 2.1 to 7.6) and 1.8 to 5.1 (combined estimate, 3.1 (95% CI, 2.1 to 4.6)), respectively. The results suggest that the STRATIFY tool can be used as a screening tool to detect patients at high risk for falls in a Japanese acute care setting as used commonly in other countries.