Fall Prevention in Care Homes

Start with a system, not a slogan

Every care home has a falls policy. Far fewer have a falls system: a short list of named risk factors, a documented review cadence, an environment that somebody walks on a rota, and a way to see whether anything actually changed. A policy tells staff what to do after a fall. A system is what reduces the number of falls worth writing up.

This checklist is written for the people who run the floor. It is deliberately practical, and it avoids promising outcomes. Nothing here guarantees that a resident will not fall. The aim is simpler and more honest: find the risk factors you can modify, record them once so they are not re-discovered every quarter, and notice a change sooner rather than later.

The risk factors worth recording

Most homes already hold this information somewhere. The problem is that it is scattered across care plans, handover notes and shift memory. Pull it into one place and keep it current.

• Recent history: a fall in the last twelve months, or more than one in a quarter, is the most useful signal you already hold. Write it down where the next shift will see it, and connect it to how you record fall risk.
• Medication: sedatives, antihypertensives and diuretics change balance and blood pressure. A medication change should trigger a fresh look, not just a care-plan edit.
• Mobility and transfers: how the resident stands, turns and reaches. Anyone who has just been moved to a higher bed or a different chair is worth re-checking within the week.
• Cognition and orientation: new confusion, night-time restlessness and a changed reaction to an unfamiliar route often show up before an incident, not after it.
• Vision, hearing and footwear: the unglamorous factors that keep reappearing in post-incident reviews.
• Continence and toileting: urgency, frequency and the route to the toilet at night. Most night-time incidents happen on that route, not in the bed.

The environment is the cheapest prevention you will fund

Environment fixes are unglamorous and they work on everyone in the room at once. Walk the route a resident actually takes, at the time they actually take it, and check it against a written list.

• Lighting: even light along the whole night-time route, including the toilet path, with switching that works without turning a light on and looking for it.
• Flooring: dry and non-slip, no trailing cables, no rucked mats. Check after every cleaning round rather than once a week.
• Furniture and handrails: a fixed route with rails a seated resident can actually reach, and no gap where a hand expects one.
• Bed and chair height: low enough to reach the floor, high enough to stand from. Flag every new bed and re-check anyone who changed rooms.
• Call bells: reachable from the bed and from the floor. Ask a resident to test it rather than testing it yourself.

Routines that catch risk early

Prevention lives in the handover, not in the binder. Give falls a standing slot in every shift exchange and name one person who owns the whole system.

• Handover: the top three fall-risk residents and anything that changed since the last shift.
• Night rounds: scheduled and recorded, with the toilet route checked, not only the bed.
• Post-fall review within 24 hours: what changed, what to test, and who owns the fix.
• A named owner: one person accountable for the falls system, with a monthly look at the incident data rather than an annual one.

Where monitoring technology fits

Technology does not replace this checklist, and it should not be sold as if it does. What a zone-based monitoring system can do is shorten the time between a fall and a response, and produce a consistent record of what happened. A typical SI (artificial intelligence AI)-assisted setup upgrades the CCTV a home already has into something that looks for fall-like events in a monitored zone and then alerts staff. Where it is built on edge processing and skeletal detection, raw video does not have to leave the building, which is usually the first question a resident's family asks.

You can read how to compare those options in choosing a fall detection system, and how we handle the privacy question in our FAQ. Some homes pair detection with a training programme for residents, which is the role Sanospark plays in our own family of products. The sensing and risk-prediction side is Steadicore.

Put the checklist to work

A checklist changes nothing until it has a cadence and an owner. Four rhythms are usually enough for a mid-sized home.

• Weekly: walk the night route with the checklist and fix what you find on the spot.
• Monthly: review incidents and near-misses by zone, not just by resident.
• Quarterly: re-assess every resident's recorded risk factors.
• Annually: re-evaluate the monitoring approach itself, including what you can and cannot see.

What we publish, and what we do not

We are a technology company, not a care provider, so we try to be careful about claims. Our public impact dashboard explains which figures we publish, which are still illustrative, and why we label them that way.