Falls in Care Homes: “Let’s go and invent tomorrow, instead of worrying about what happened yesterday….”

Dr Jane Horne has spent over ten years as a Senior Research Fellow and Occupational Therapist at the University of Nottingham. She will be speaking at the virtual 21st International Conference on Falls and Postural Stability in Plenary session #3 and live for the Q & A’s. Her session will focus on embedding evidence-based falls resources into care homes to reduce falls. She tweets occasionally: @janechorne and @FinCH_Study.

There has been a significant focus on UK care homes following COVID-19. Care homes have had to quickly adapt their working practices, to keep their residents and staff safe. Approximately 400,000 older people are currently living in UK care homes. Care home residents remain one of the most vulnerable populations in our society with complex health and social care needs, including frailty, dementia and multiple comorbidities which infer together an elevated falls risk. Falls are not pleasant to experience, and can lead to loss of life, serious injury and pain. They are also not pleasant to witness, as care home staff will describe.

Care home residents are three times more likely to fall than people living in the community. Residents continue to fall, and in the current climate, with multiple changes required to best manage COVID-19, it is difficult to support care home staff to prevent, modify and manage falls.

A rehabilitation research team has been undertaking a programme of falls prevention research led by Professor Pip Logan for over ten years. The first known holistic Guide to Action Tool, which collected all the risk factors in one place, was developed and published (Robertson et al 2010). However, care homes wanted something specific to them and their residents and worked with us to develop the Guide to Action for Falls Prevention Tool – Care Homes (GtACH). Both are now being used extensively, in clinical practice.

The GtACH has currently been evaluated for its effectiveness in reducing falls as part of a systematic falls prevention programme. A randomised control trial (RCT) (which will be the biggest care home trial conducted in the UK) is complete, and we are awaiting the results.

However, it is also imperative to examine evidence-based resources, such as the GtACH, using our available technology. We need to ensure that they are sustainable and accessible to all care home staff in the longer term.

This talk will highlight the process of working with the care home community to develop a web-based resource. It will also explore the results of a qualitative study that captured the barriers and facilitators described by care home staff when embedding the evidence into current care home systems