Q Exchange
Falls Improvement Work – Implementation of the 3 year Falls strategy
- Idea
- 2018
Meet the team: Falls Improvement Team -
Also:
- June Hughes, Vicky HIrd, Ward Managers and Sisters across the Trust both acute and community with other allied health professionals. The Director of Nursing Noel Scanlon and Joanne Todd Associate Director for Safety and Governance
- All staff who form our Trust falls committee and falls collaborative with other agencies identified in the Strategy.
Whilst implementing our falls strategy we also want to influence the safety culture around our whole area with engagement of all stakeholders including charities, community, acute sectors with commissioners and others coming together to prevent harm to the most vulnerable in our society.
Education at every level, within acute, but focus on community in care homes and patients own homes so they self identify and refer to falls clinics in our area. Media campaign to be commenced with other stakeholders, ambulance, fire brigade, alarm systems to identify those that need to go to hospital or can have home visits or referral to clinics for review.
We are working with regional organisations leads, but via the Q programme would like to widen the sharing and support for this work. We will use the PDSA quality improvement cycles trialing new ways of working and implement ideas that work. The Enhanced Care model for cognitive impaired patients, using volunteers is being piloted at the moment and we intend to implement this Trust wide.
Our Falls Bundle follows the Royal College of Physicians model and best practice we are undertaking back to floor Fridays to ensure this is implemented correctly with a national audit taking place in 2019
Pharmacy improvements in both acute and community to avoid drugs that can result in falls and cause supine hypotension unless life critical with improved documentation for pharmacists in our area is to be rolled out.
How you can contribute
- Support and sharing of ideas that may have worked in their areas. We are joining the NHS England Falls collaborative and did some small changes last year and intend to continue with our research and audit teams to trial different pieces of work so the whole culture of the organisation is involved.
Comments
Delcy Wells 15 Jun 2018
Thank you to everyone who has commented as we are in the next round for funding and have joined the national falls collaborative with two specific ward based projects as well as the strategy outcomes we are working on.
The pharmacy element is being implemented with community pharmacy and acute training. Regards Delcy
Michael Wilcock 14 Jun 2018
Reviewing those medicines that mighty contribute to falls is indeed important but your more holistic approach around the home environment (poor lighting, wearing inappropriate slippers, etc) is to be welcomed.
Hein leRoux 10 Jun 2018
Reducing preventable falls would be laudable. I am a GP and I think we need to do more work to raise the profile of falls in the community. We have about 800 neck of femur fractures in our system per year and I think that could be a proxy outcome measure for your planned work. I know the Canterbury (New Zealand) system have reduced hip fractures by a quarter with their falls strategy so a whole system's approach does work. Good luck and please share any learning and improvement that you achieve.
Wasim Baqir 3 Jun 2018
Pharmacy led medicines optimisation reviews within a shared decision making framework can reduce inappropriate poly pharmacy. The CHIPPS Study (https://www.uea.ac.uk/chipps/summary) is investigating the impact prescribing pharmacist medication reviews with falls being the primary outcome. Lots of med review tools. My preferred is NHS Scotland 7 Steps (http://www.polypharmacy.scot.nhs.uk/7-steps) or Northumbria's 3 Questions (https://www.health.org.uk/programmes/shine-2012/projects/multidisciplinary-review-medication-nursing-homes-clinico-ethical).
Good luck,
Delcy Wells 23 May 2018
Thank you will look at this.
Doris Behrens 23 May 2018
Important work indeed! At ABCi, Daniel Gartner has built a little app that is freely downloadable from play store called FRA2ction for "falls risk assessment in action" (which is the best search term). We found this tool quite useful to increase engagement and create ownership -- FRA2ction might create a similar response in the context of your project ...
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