Validation and reliability of Falls Risk for Hospitalized Older People (FRHOP)

A comprehensive fall risk assessment can provide information for effective prevention and intervention measures and reduce falls among hospitalized elderly people. The purpose of this study was to develop a Chinese version of an inpatient fall risk assessment tool and evaluate its validity and reliability.This study employed the Falls Risk for Hospitalised Older People (FRHOP) assessment to construct a FRHOP-Taiwan Version (Tw-FRHOP) through forward, synthesized, and backward translation. A face validation was conducted by 5 clinical nurses and a content validation was conducted by 5 specialists using the content validity index (CVI) to validate the proposed model. Thirty hospitalized older adults in an internal care unit were selected for an interrater reliability assessment, conducted separately by specialists in 4 disciplines (i.e., nurses, physicians, occupational therapists, and physiotherapists) by using Cohen kappa statistic and intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs). Specifically, the assessment rating developed in the Tw-FRHOP was compared with the Morse Fall Scale (MFS), St. Thomas Risk Assessment Tool in Falling Elderly Inpatients (STRATIFY), and the Hendrich II Fall Risk Model (HIIFRM) for criterion validation.According to the analysis results, the CVI was 0.94, and the indexes of criterion-related validity for the FRHOP-Taiwan Version, MFS, STRATIFY, and HIIFRM were 0.49, 0.63, and 0.54 (all P < .001), respectively. In addition, after interrater reliability testing was conducted, the results indicated that the index of response consistency in each discipline was 86.7% to 100%, and the values of Cohen kappa were 0.651 to 1.000. The ICCs of the discipline-related subscale were 0.97 to 1.00.The Tw-FRHOP is a multidisciplinary comprehensive fall risk assessment that can serve as a satisfactorily valid and reliable reference tool for medical personnel with full professional training, as well as inpatient fall prevention interventions for multidisciplinary teams in hospitals.