ARC Themes
Why the research is needed
Falls in care home residents are common, harmful, costly and difficult to prevent. The Guide to Action for Falls Prevention Care Homes (GtACH) programme is an intervention in which enables care home staff to identify the reasons residents fall and then carry out actions to reduce risks. We need to look at how we can implement and embed the GtACH programme in the real world, outside the context of a trial. In order to do this we need to work with care home and healthcare staff, residents and their families to develop an package to implement GtACH consistently across care homes, regardless of their size, design, business model, staffing arrangements, or resident mix.
Who we are working with
This project has been written in collaboration with care home managers. It will establish a group of care home staff, and healthcare professionals, using principles of shared working between care homes and the NHS identified through our recent research, to identify and overcome barriers to implementing the GtACH in care homes. This may, for example, include steps to make GtACH easier for care home staff to use, or to develop an electronic version for use on portable devices. We will develop audit tools to help care homes understand organisational issues that might impact on implementation of the GtACH programme, and to establish whether it has been delivered as intended.
What the benefits will be
We will establish metrics that can show whether the GtACH has improved outcomes for residents. We recognise from our recent work that care homes will only collect data in ways that are compatible with care homes’ existing patterns of working, and we will design all audit tools, process and outcome measures in conjunction with care home staff with this in mind. We, with care home staff will produce a GtACH implementation package by January 2021.
How we are planning for implementation
The GtACH programme implementation package will then be tried out in up to four care homes in two sites in the East Midlands.
Contact
PI Professor Pip Logan
Lead Researcher, Dr Jane Horne (Jane.Horne@nottingham.ac.uk)