Community of Practice on falls in long-term care open across Canada
Year-long collaborative on falls in long-term care comes to an end
Friday July 3, 2009 -- Jason Thompson
With the completion of the National Collaborative on the Prevention of Falls in Long-Term Care, the online community of practice for improvement teams is scheduled to change from a closed to an open community early this month.

The move will allow long-term care providers across the country an opportunity to join their colleagues in working to reduce the incidence of falls and injury from falls.

Led by the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO), and in partnership with Safer Healthcare Now (SHN), involvement in the national collaborative required a 12-month commitment to set up improvement teams at the organizational level and work towards implementing best practices in falls prevention.

To help support improvement efforts on the ground, four learning sessions were scheduled over the course of the past year to give improvement teams best practices with respect to falls assessment, prevention and injury reduction.

According to Health Canada, as many as 50 per cent of residents in long-term care homes fall each year, 10 per cent resulting in serious injury, impacting quality of life for residents and cost to the healthcare system. Nearly half of those residents will fall more than once.

To commemorate the end of the national collaborative, a closing congress was held from May 25 to 26 in Edmonton, with the aim of summarizing and sharing what was learned over the past year through a series of rapid-fire presentations that included creative knowledge transfer strategies such as games, poems, stories and PowerPoint summaries.

Irmajean Bajnok, director of international affairs and best practice guidelines programs with the RNAO and the chair of collaborative, says evidence has shown that if properly implemented, best practices can help an organization provide better care for patients or residents, as well as reduce some of their own costs.

“When you look at some of the outcomes . . . the evidence is there both in terms of positive outcomes for people as well as economic outcomes. This is something we really need to focus on,” Bajnok told HIROC News. “There are some clear target areas that are very doable that will have a great impact, both people-wise and cost-wise.”

In the end, 16 per cent of improvement teams achieved or exceeded the 40 per cent target for falls reduction while 13 per cent reached the 40 per cent target for reduction of falls resulting in an injury.

According to SHN, these outcomes indicate that a significant reduction in falls can be achieved and that improvement is possible in the long-term care sector.

“It is evident that many teams have been able to establish approaches to falls risk assessment, establish approaches to resident reassessment when there is a status change, and ensure that there are falls interventions in place for at risk residents,” SHN literature states.

“With the significant impact on process measures seen during the course of the collaborative, we would expect to see a corresponding change in the outcome measures as these practice changes take hold — the key message to the teams is to keep going.”

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