Falls in Hospitals – driving improvements in care

Systems approach – Falls in hospital

Regardless of the reason for admission many older people are vulnerable to a fall during inpatient stays. Systematic risk screening and evidence-based care planning can reduce risk. Discharge planning should include ongoing preventative care.

Improvement in the care of older people requires:

executive leadership, governance and monitoring
expert clinical leads (nursing, medical and allied health) to support strategic interventions.

The Clinical Excellence Commission will focus on evidence based interventions, individual patient risk assessment and response and support to hospitals wishing to build highly reliable healthcare teams to drive improvements in care.

This will include ward based essentials of safety such as huddles, more reliable detection and management of confusion (dementia and/delirium) which mandates high falls risk, medication safety including reconciliation, rounding and safe patient mobilisation.

The CEC is developing a Clinical Reporting System linked to Quality Audit Reporting Systems (QARS) to provide clinical data to teams and hospitals. This will enable clinical and quality staff to access to Incident Information Management System (IIMS), Health Information Exchange (HIE) data, and to post and track interventions on run charts and measure process and outcomes measures.

The CEC will provide evidence based interventions; facilitate implementation of change concepts, data, site visits, regular communication and assistance as requested by local health districts.