Research led by nurses at Huntsville Hospital for Women & Children is giving hospitals across the country clearer ways to identify when newborns may be at higher risk of falling during their birth hospitalization.
The multi-hospital study appears in the July/August 2026 issue of MCN: The American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing. Researchers examined 88 newborn falls at 15 hospitals and identified 11 factors linked to increased risk. The findings build on more than 14 years of newborn safety work that started at Women & Children in 2012.
At the time, little published research existed on newborn falls. A team of 14 mother-baby nurses, led by longtime clinical educator Rose Mary Ainsworth, developed a prevention program that included staff and parent education, bedside practices and one of the nation’s first newborn fall-prevention assessment scales. Falls dropped at the hospital, and other facilities began asking for guidance. Many adopted the Huntsville scale.
“We realized the research didn’t always agree,” Ainsworth said. “If we wanted to improve the assessment tool, we needed better data.”
Ainsworth later worked with Mother Baby Charge Nurse Maria Caceres, Clinical Education Specialist Bonnie Mullen and retired University of Alabama in Huntsville nursing professor Dr. Ellise Adams on the larger study. Among the risk factors they identified were overnight hours, the second and third nights after birth, cesarean delivery, maternal blood loss or anemia, prescribed opioid use within four hours of a fall, and significant postpartum fatigue.
The team is now working on a third publication to validate an updated inpatient newborn fall-prevention assessment scale.
“I didn’t do this by myself,” Ainsworth said. “It took a team of nurses who cared deeply about our patients and wanted to make things better.”
The full account of the nurses’ work and the research behind it is available at hh.health/blog/how-huntsville-hospital-for-women-children-nurses-helped-advance-newborn-safety-nationwide.
Zachary Austin is a writer for 256 Today. You can contact him at [email protected].
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