Fall Prevention Awareness Week: Why Workforce Needs a Safety Management Solution

Every September, Fall Prevention Awareness Week reminds hospitals and skilled nursing facilities that falls are not an inevitable part of aging. Posters and pledge cards will not lower a fall rate on their own. A safety management solution can, by connecting the people delivering care with the technology that is supposed to be watching for risk.

In this piece, we cover:

• Why falls cost the U.S. healthcare system tens of billions of dollars a year, and what is driving the increase
• The direct link researchers have found between nurse turnover and patient fall rates
• Why clinical confidence and experience matter as much as headcount
• What a true safety management solution needs to include to catch risk before it becomes harm

The cost of getting this wrong

Falls among adults 65 and older cost the U.S. healthcare system roughly $80 billion a year in non-fatal injury care, up from $50 billion in 2015. Medicare alone covers about two-thirds of that bill, and total costs are projected to top $101 billion by 2030 as the population ages.

For skilled nursing facilities, falls carry regulatory and financial consequences on top of the clinical ones. Falls with major injury are already a measure inside the Skilled Nursing Facility Quality Reporting Program (SNF QRP). Starting with the FY 2027 program year, it also becomes one of eight measures scored under the Skilled Nursing Facility Value-Based Purchasing (SNF VBP) program, up from four measures in FY 2026 (and a single measure from FY 2019 through FY 2025). Staff turnover has been one of those four measures since FY 2026. FY 2027 is the first year CMS scores falls and workforce turnover side by side in the same incentive payment calculation.

Nurse turnover is tied to more falls

The connection between staffing and falls used to be more assumption than evidence. That is changing.

A December 2025 study in JAMA Network Open, led by researchers at Boston College, analyzed 8,584 hospital units nationwide. After adjusting patient risk and staffing levels, the researchers found that a 10-percentage-point increase in nurse turnover was associated with roughly 36 additional patient falls per year in a hospital caring for 1,000 inpatients daily. Of seven practice-environment factors measured, only one, nurses’ intent to stay, showed a significant association with fall rates. The researchers concluded that efforts to reduce turnover, particularly in medical units, could have measurable downstream effects on patient safety.

That finding turns retention into a patient-safety metric as much as an HR one.

Confidence matters as much as headcount

Headcount is not the whole story. Confidence and experience matter just as much as the numbers on a schedule.

Research on nursing practice links clinicians’ confidence in fall prevention to their training and workload, plus how long they have been doing the job. Heavy assignments and constant interruptions erode that confidence over time. Mentoring and workable ratios help, along with training that does not stop after orientation. Experienced staff notice more. A resident who normally walks steadily starts to hesitate at the doorway, and a nurse who has cared for her for months catches the change right away, something a newer aide covering six extra rooms is less likely to see. The same goes for a medication that starts affecting someone’s balance, or a spill nobody wiped up. Familiarity is what catches these things before they become a fall.

Those instincts leave the building with experienced staff, and turnover speeds up how often that happens.

A stable, well-supported team, backed by a workforce management solution that keeps schedules predictable and overtime in check, does more for fall prevention than most facilities give it credit for.

Why a safety management solution needs two toolkits

Falls rarely have a single cause. A patient recovering from surgery might also start a new medication that affects her balance, and nobody connects the two until she is on the floor.

Catching that combination takes two things: someone who knows enough to notice it, and a schedule stable enough that they have time to act on what they see.

That is the intersection where workforce management and a safety management solution meet. On the workforce side, the right tools help organizations:

• Aligning staffing levels with real-time patient acuity, not just census
• Reduce reliance on overtime and agency staff that erodes continuity of care
• Build predictable schedules that support retention
• Preserve the institutional knowledge that comes with experienced, stable teams

On the clinical side, a safety event reporting solution helps organizations:

• Document and track incidents, including falls, medication errors, and pressure ulcers, in one system instead of scattered paper logs
• Automatically route events to the right reviewers with escalation rules, so nothing slips through the cracks
• Surface root causes with built-in tools like fishbone diagrams and the 5 Whys, rather than relying on memory after the fact
• Spot patterns across units or facilities before they escalate into repeat harm

Neither one replaces the other. A safety system cannot replace an experienced nurse’s judgment, and no amount of individual skill fixes chronic understaffing. The facilities with the strongest safety records fund both.

Beyond Fall Prevention Awareness Week

The National Council on Aging’s Falls Prevention Awareness Week toolkit is built to reach older adults and the public, and it should be used for exactly that. Hospital and SNF leaders need a second, internal toolkit: staffing systems that keep experienced caregivers at the bedside, paired with a safety management solution that helps those caregivers see risk earlier.

Falls prevention was never just a nursing issue. Regulators are now scoring workforce stability and safety systems together, and the organizations already treating them as one strategy to protect their quality scores, and their patients, well past Fall Prevention Awareness Week.

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