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FALL

Fall from hospital bed kills elderly woman

An elderly woman died from the injuries she sustained after falling out of her hospital bed at Sundsvall’s hospital in northern Sweden, where more similar falls have occurred recently.

Fall from hospital bed kills elderly woman

The incident occurred earlier this summer. The woman had been put up in the internal medicine ward, and the staff had judged her to be at high risk of falling, and her bed rail was therefore to remain in place.

However, the elderly woman demanded to have the bed rail removed. Later that same morning, she fell out of bed and broke her hip, and later died from her injuries, reported local newspaper Dagbladet.

Just a month earlier, in May, two elderly women in the same clinic were injured in similar ways. The two women, both in their mid-eighties, sustained broken bones from their accidents.

All three falls have now been reported to the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) in accordance with Sweden’s Lex Maria, the informal name for regulations governing the reporting of injuries or incidents in the Swedish health care system.

“We’re working intensely to try to reduce these types of accidents,” Margareta Lundkvist, head of the internal medicine clinic, said to Dagbladet.

During the autumn the clinic is planning to hold team training about how to prevent falls, according to Lundkvist.

“Entirely preventing these types of accidents is nearly impossible,” she said.

The National Board of Health and Welfare has set a goal for the country’s hospitals: no more than five fall accidents per 1,000 patients.

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