Prognostic factors associated with injurious falls in hospitalised adult patients: a systematic review

Electronic searches on MEDLINE and CINAHL will be performed. Screening of reference lists of eligible studies will also be undertaken. The search strategy will be broad to include terms related to (a) population/setting (hospital, inpatients, adults), (b) outcome (fall-related injuries) and (c) prognosis and study methods (studies of predictive factors, association, and prognosis). The search will be refined to exclude all children or paediatric related citations. To increase sensitivity we will screen abstracts and titles together, as previous experience indicates that titles do not often report all relevant information (e.g. setting).

Only publications in English will be included and no restrictions are set for time of publication. Studies will not be limited to any potential prognostic factors, but rather we will seek to include any factors which have been explored. Because studies on predictors can be problematic to retrieve, a combination of Haynes and Ingui filters designed for finding prediction research in MEDLINE (Geersing et al. 2012, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032844) will be used and the same method will be applied to CINAHL.