GERs – Grrrrrrrrr by Pat Watt
April 12th, 2012 | 
Author: I sat in on Kim (Champney’s) monthly Therap Brown Bag lunch today. The subject was GER’s. Talk about confusion. Let’s take a situation where a client falls down but is not injured. Keeping track of falls is important in our agency. To record this event, you have to select one of 6 choices in the GER screen:
OK: the client wasn’t injured, so it wasn’t an Injury. It wasn’t a Medication Error. It wasn’t a Restraint Related to Behavior, or Restraint Other (why do we need to distinguish these?), it wasn’t Death (why does that warrant it’s own button?), so it must be Other. So we pick Other and in the required description box we type “fall”, or “Fall” or “client fell down”, or something to that effect. Oh, dear that won’t work for tracking falls – due to inconsistent labeling we won’t be able to pull out all the falls from the GER report. Back to the drawing board.
This time select the Injury button (even though there was no injury), and again we have to select “Other” as the Event Type – so what do we put in the required description box? Oh I see, I have to type in “No injury.”
I feel like I’m in the twilight zone.
Therap – you can do better than this…..
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Pat, we use accident no apparent injury under other for this type of event.
Pat
This is actually a topic I have been discussing with a bunch of people recently.
I am now of the opinion that we should have an injury severity of No Injury (and an Injury Type or No Injury)
In someways this is also a bit illogical, but I think it makes the most sense based on the types of scenarios you describe.
If your interested, the reason we have “Accident with no apparent injury” filed under “Other” is based on the State of Connecticut form upon which we originally based the GER.
I am also advocating for dropping the “Other” fields under Injury Type, Injury Cause, and Other Event Type. We’ve done this very successfully in Nebraska.
With all of this though we have to take a careful look at the impact on all our users and our existing data
:: Justin ::
Wow – impressed with such a fast and high-level response! We kind of wondered who reads the blog, and now we know!
thank you.
And happy springtime to all at Therap.
Pat – in NM we also categorize falls with no injury as an “Injury” and type in none in the other box. It does make pulling reporting easier and consistent. We can look at all the falls in one place and see which ones have injuries and which ones don’t. But as Justin says – this becomes a training issue as it is counterintuitive to the user.