Co-design of a decision support tool for falls prevention in primary care

Background

Falling in the elderly causes injury, pain, loss of confidence and independence. Treating the consequences of falls also places high demands on the NHS and Social Care. However, if those at risk of falling are identified early then relatively simple measures can be taken to lower their risk e.g. ensuring someone has regular eye tests.

GP practices are expected to identify patients who are at risk of falling and to refer them to services for help. However, GPs are under increasing pressure to see more and more patients. There are other people in the GP practice who could assess a patient’s falls risk and help take action to reduce this. These people do something called Social Prescribing, which means understanding a patient’s need then signposting to community groups and/or expert advisors for social, emotional and wellbeing support.

We have previously developed the ‘Guide to Action’ for use in care homes. It is a checklist of factors that are implicated in falls and suggestions of what can be done about each factor. These include problems with sleep, hydration, balance, dizziness and home environment. The guide been developed and tested in care homes by members of the research team (Logan, Allen, Darby) and been shown to reduce the number of falls. We would like to take this guide, or a similar one, and adapt it for use by people who do social prescribing to help them undertake the falls risk assessment of patients and guide preventative actions.

Aim:

To produce a ‘standardised tool’ (or guide) that will help the people who do social prescribing identify people at risk of falling and support action to be taken.

Methods

To undertake a review of published studies to identify tools that have been developed already to identify falls risk and take action.

To adapt the most suitable tool for use by people who do social prescribing. Importantly we will work with people who do social prescribing and patients to do this work. This is called co-design.

Results

The tool that we develop will be used in a future study to test how feasible it would be to do a large trial where we compare falls risk in people who are offered this falls assessment and action, versus those that are not.

Conclusion

People who do social prescribing in GP practices are in a good position to help prevent falls in the elderly by identifying those at risk and helping them to take action. However currently there isn’t a standardised way of doing this. This research study will help produce a standardised tool to bridge this gap.

Amount awarded: £55,708