Talking about falls: a qualitative exploration of spoken communication of patients' fall risks in hospitals and implications for multifactorial approaches to fall prevention.

View/ Open
Accepted manuscript (293.1Kb)
Download
Publication date
2024-03Author
McVey, LynnAlvarado, Natasha
Healey, F.
Montague, Jane
Todd, C.
Zaman, Hadar
Dowding, D.
Lynch, A.
Issa, B.
Randell, Rebecca

Rights
© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.Peer-Reviewed
YesOpen Access status
openAccessopenAccess
Accepted for publication
2023-10-21
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Inpatient falls are the most common safety incident reported by hospitals worldwide. Traditionally, responses have been guided by categorising patients' levels of fall risk, but multifactorial approaches are now recommended. These target individual, modifiable fall risk factors, requiring clear communication between multidisciplinary team members. Spoken communication is an important channel, but little is known about its form in this context. We aim to address this by exploring spoken communication between hospital staff about fall prevention and how this supports multifactorial fall prevention practice. Data were collected through semistructured qualitative interviews with 50 staff and ethnographic observations of fall prevention practices (251.25 hours) on orthopaedic and older person wards in four English hospitals. Findings were analysed using a framework approach. We observed staff engaging in 'multifactorial talk' to address patients' modifiable risk factors, especially during multidisciplinary meetings which were patient focused rather than risk type focused. Such communication coexisted with 'categorisation talk', which focused on patients' levels of fall risk and allocating nursing supervision to 'high risk' patients. Staff negotiated tensions between these different approaches through frequent 'hybrid talk', where, as well as categorising risks, they also discussed how to modify them. To support hospitals in implementing multifactorial, multidisciplinary fall prevention, we recommend: (1) focusing on patients' individual risk factors and actions to address them (a 'why?' rather than a 'who' approach); (2) where not possible to avoid 'high risk' categorisations, employing 'hybrid' communication which emphasises actions to modify individual risk factors, as well as risk level; (3) challenging assumptions about generic interventions to identify what individual patients need; and (4) timing meetings to enable staff from different disciplines to participate.Version
Accepted manuscriptCitation
McVey L, Alvarado N, Healey F et al (2024) Talking about falls: a qualitative exploration of spoken communication of patients' fall risks in hospitals and implications for multifactorial approaches to fall prevention. BMJ Quality and Safety. 33(3): 166-172.Link to Version of Record
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2023-016481https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2023-016481
Type
Articleae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2023-016481