Fall prevention

Do your falls prevention adaptations lead to improvements?

16 Apr 2021

Monitoring falls helps to better understand why residents fall (the causes of falls) and to develop concrete actions to prevent falls.

The Platform for Continuous Improvement of Quality of Care and Patient Safety - PAQS ASBL - aims to promote, support and organise the development and implementation of continuous improvement of quality and safety in health care institutions in Brussels and Wallonia.

PAQS offers a free and time-saving tool to exploit data such as those encoded in the falls register: the "Run Chart". An Excel file is available free of charge on the PAQS website, which also has a video explaining how to use it.

Run Chart: a free file on the PAQS website

This Excel file is based on a "Run Chart", a graphic tool for both nursing homes and hospitals.

"Often, the teams involved say they lack time. Our role is to help them by providing useful resources. We can see that once the continuous improvement process is launched, the results are very encouraging.

The way the file works is simple: you simply enter the number of falls per month into the file and a graph is generated to visualise the data and note the variations.

Explanatory video

Mandatory falls register

Care facilities for the elderly continuously collect various data (call register, pressure sores, falls, etc.). This information is collected and stored but not systematically used for the continuous improvement of daily practices.

In Belgium, institutions are legally obliged to keep a falls register. According to Laure Istas, this is a compilation of interesting data, but often this legal obligation is adhered to. But these data are extremely useful indicators for the teams.

Training for MR and MRS

PAQS goes beyond making this tool available by organising practical workshops for the MR and MRS sector, aimed at directors, coordinating doctors, nurses, quality referents, social workers, etc. In short, anyone who has to carry out a continuous improvement project.

The "Falls Workshops" consist of three days to learn how to use the tool and to go further:

To acquire theoretical knowledge

To benefit from a space for exchange on how to implement the tools taught

To share results and experiences

"For example, if we observe ten falls per month, we will ask ourselves why and whether we can reduce them to eight. To do this, we are going to analyse the causes in order to act on them.

In concrete terms, this ranges from setting up "Balance" workshops for residents to strengthen their muscle tone, to reorganising a very long corridor where we have noticed that out-of-breath and tired residents often stumble. Sometimes, adding a chair in the middle of the corridor is already an improvement that reduces the number of falls.