Adapting Action Falls for Palliative Care
- Principal Investigator: Frances Allen
- 1 April 2023 to 31 December 2023
- Project No: 613
- Funding round: FR5
Falls are a common and often life changing experience particularly for older people or those with medical conditions. There are many ways that people who fall can be affected, these include injury, losing confidence, losing independence and death. Falls in Hospices are up to four times more common than in care homes. Palliative care patients are at a greater risk of injury when they fall when compared to older people.
The Action Falls programme is a system of training and assessing the risk of falling for an individual followed by taking actions to reduce these risks. In a research study called the FinCH trial, the Action Falls programme was shown to be cost-effective and reduced falls by 43% in care homes.
Patients in palliative care can have problems similar to people in residential care such as older people and cognitive impairment. However, hospice patients also can have falls risks specific to palliative care such as symptomatic decline, opioid use and brain metastases which mean that the current Action Falls programme may not be work as effectively in hospice care settings.
In this study we are asking: How can the Action Falls multifactorial falls assessment programme be adapted for use within Hospice care?
Which will enable us to write guidelines for adapting the Action Falls programme specifically for use in Hospice care.
To answer these questions, we will ask a group of 13 palliative care experts and those who have experienced palliative care as a family member or patient to look at parts of the Action Falls programme. We will then ask them to discuss and decide which part of Action Falls could be used in hospices and which are not needed. This method is called the RAND/UCLA Appropriateness Method and consisting of three rounds and using 13 participants will be completed.
We hope that the output from this study will help improve hospice care by: highlighting important areas for falls prevention within Hospice care which will be shared with the Hospice care community through forums, presentations and journal papers.
Secondly, these results will form part of the development of a new way of assessing and preventing falls in hospices which can be studied in our next research project.
Amount Awarded: £29,404