Winner

Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust: Reducing falls through our falls QI collaborative

The trust has managed to reduce falls per 1,000 bed days by 26 per cent – and falls causing harm by 62 per cent – by adopting a quality improvement approach across all wards, not just those with elderly patients.

This has involved developing a bundle of interventions including safety huddles, ensuring patients wear appropriate footwear, cohorting high risk patients, and intentional rounding. When patients do fall, post falls reviews enable shared learning.

The approach was piloted across a range of specialties using plan-do-study-act cycles to address each of the main drivers for falls to develop the bundle, and was then scaled up across the organisation over a year, with a focus on embedding the changes. Access to improvement data and celebrating success were important, together with patient stories demonstrating what falls can mean to patients. Falls are now seen as everyone’s responsibility to prevent.

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Finalists:

  • Ashford & St. Peter’s Hospitals FT: Improving Medication Safety - The ‘30/30’ Aim – HIGHLY COMMENDED
  • Cheshire & Wirral Partnership FT: Improving medicines safety for people with serious mental illness through digital referrals to community pharmacy
  • Hounslow and Richmond Community Healthcare Trust in partnership with Spark the Difference: Beyond systems and processes: improving patient safety by focusing on what matters to patients
  • Innovation Agency (AHSN for the North West Coast): The North West Coast Atrial Fibrillation Collaborative
  • Push Doctor: Perfect Week Programme
  • Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals Trust: E-handover: Improving safety of handover of patient information
  • Sherwood Forest Hospitals FT: Acute Non-Invasive Ventilation (NIV) – A Journey Towards Outstanding Care
  • The Rotherham FT: Reducing mortality through interventions in the fractured neck of femur pathway
  • The Royal Wolverhampton Trust: Expanding an Innovative Nurse-Led Gastroenterology Day-Case Service
  • Walsall Healthcare Trust: An AI approach to the transformation of the safety culture within the organisation

HSJ Patient Safety Awards 2019 winners revealed