Figures presented to Bedford Borough Council show that falls accounted for 3,000 ambulance call-outs in the borough last year, with 800 resulting in hospital admissions.
As part of an update on the Better Care Fund, Simon White, chief officer for health integration, gave an overview to the Health & Well Being Board last week (9 March) of the services that are on offer to those who have fallen in the borough.
“The first response team are their support workers, and they provide a home-based holistic assessment of a person once they’ve fallen, what factors were involved, and they try to come up with person-centred solutions,” he said.
“The idea of the team is to keep people safe, to increase their confidence, one of the things that happens most when somebody has had a fall is their loss of confidence and the knock-on effect on their independence.
“So we look at the risk factors, we assess mobility, the ability to self-care, medication, and the home environment”
Mr White added that the team is able to prescribe equipment, minor works like a grab rail. Its own inventory means that it can get equipment such as perching stools and commodes, into homes fairly quickly.
“We had an 89-year-old lady who lived alone, she was referred to us from the East of England Ambulance Service following a fall.
“She wasn’t injured in the fall, it was just getting out of bed and she fell.
“There was an assessment completed, we found she had fallen a number of times in the past month.
“She also got tired standing for any length of time and she was struggling to get up and down when sitting in bed.
“Following that initial assessment, we put in a perching stool in the kitchen, so that she could do meal preparation without being too tired, a bed stick to help her get in and out [of bed], grab rails in the bathroom to get on and off the toilet, and by the front door.
“We put in the referral and got a telecare pendant alarm, and we arranged for the wheelie bins to be collected from the garden on collection day rather than have to try and put them out herself,” he said.
Boosting confidence
Advice was also given on getting around, as well as suggesting suitable replacement furniture. “We did a follow-up review some months later,” Mr White added.
“She’d only had one fall since the previous visit and she’d used the pendant alarm [to get help].
“The fall was entering the home by the front door when she had bags of shopping, so our support worker arranged for half step to be put in just to transition from street to house a little bit better.
“She reported that she felt the equipment had been brilliant, it really worked. She felt much more competent and confident in staying in her own home too.
“That’s the type of thing full-service we do, that’s a common, set of scenarios, it’s minor works and it’s that building of confidence and keeping independence,” he said.
Vicky Head, director of public health for Bedford Borough, Central Bedfordshire & Milton Keynes, said: “We might sometimes think of falls as a fairly benign thing.
“Fractures are associated with 30 per cent mortality in the following years, so just remember just how critical this work is.
“[Just] to note some of our outcomes, actually in Bedford we are now looking really good.
“If we go back five or six years our rate of admission for falls in older people was higher than the England average, but we are now in the position where it’s actually lower.
“Also for hip fracture admissions we are lower than average, we’re actually among the lowest in the region, so really really great to see the progress that’s been made,” she said.
by John Guinn Local Democracy Reporter
and Bedford Independent’s Paul Hutchinson
