Heartbeat: Champions help reduce patient falls at Rowley Hospital

May 8, 2019

The success of falls champions has begun to have a dramatic impact on the reduction of patient falls at Rowley Regis Hospital.

At the start of the year we welcomed Mary Parker to our Trust as the new falls prevention specialist nurse and with her new role Mary launched her bid to reduce patient falls. Recruiting an army of ‘falls champions’ to take her fight to the wards, Mary will be spending the next few months training staff in how to safely manage and support patients, spreading her falls prevention knowledge far and wide.

Figures show that at Rowley Regis Hospital last year there were an average of 11 patient falls recorded per month, with November and December each having 17 falls recorded. With the support of the falls champions, the number of patient falls has dropped significantly with only two falls being recorded at Rowley last month.

To find out more about the secrets to the success in reducing patient falls, Heartbeat spoke to Mary Parker to find our more, she said: ”I have 27 nominated falls champions across our Trust now and they’ll be taking the knowledge and support I train them with and embedding it in to their own wards and departments.”

The work is definitely paying off too, Eliza Tinsley ward had on average five falls a month and since this work, they’ve had no further falls reported.

“One of the most important messages when it comes to reducing falls is making sure that patients are supported appropriately, what we don’t want is wards and departments that are so risk averse that patients are restricted in their mobility,” said Mary. “Every patient is different and they each need to be supported to retain their level of mobility whilst also being safe.”

Justine Irish, Matron at Rowley Regis Hospital said: “We have worked hard to reduce falls and tissue damage this year.

“Falls have been high at Rowley on and off over the last few years especially last December so we looked at how we best cared for our more at risk patients, taking some of the lessons we learnt from our falls reduction work at Leasowes Intermediate Care Centre. We learnt that taking a positive team approach was the best way to implement improvement, meaning we involved the whole team which included our therapy colleagues and the wider MDT which includes our GPs.”

“We continue to look at areas for improvement and new ways of working, we recognise the risk of falling can never completely be removed, but carrying out multifactorial assessments can identify “individualised” risks and allow you to take action to remove that risk or reduce it.”