Monitoring and Responding to Falls Alerts
Published: Thursday, 30 May 2024
One of the reasons people sign up for our Nottingham on Call service is for the peace of mind they get knowing that help is only a button press away should they have a fall.
If you have a fall, an alert can be raised to us by either pressing the button on your pendant alarm or through an automatic alert if you’re wearing a falls detector and have, what we call, a hard fall.
We offer a range of equipment options that can support you or a loved one, if there is a falls risk: Nottingham on Call supporting people with a falls risk
Our aim is to reduce the risk of a fall in the first place or, if the worst happens, to get help to you as soon as possible to reduce the time you are on the floor.
In response to a complaint, we recently received about the way a next of kin felt we dealt with a fall their Grandad had, we thought it would be useful to tell you about the process we always follow when responding to a fall alert.
We get around 170 falls related calls each month – accounting for about a quarter of all of, what we call, ‘critical calls’ received each month. In around a third of of these cases a customer will tell us they’re injured from the fall, with two-thirds reporting as uninjured but unable to get up.
If you have a fall, our trained call handling colleagues will:
- Try and speak to you through your care alarm to find out how you are, what happened and where you are
- If you’re injured, we’ll call 999 straight away and will give the emergency services all the relevant information, including medical history, so the ambulance service can prioritise their response.
- Once the ambulance has been called, we’ll contact your nominated next of kin so they can get to you, if they can. And we’ll keep the line open with you until someone has arrived – that usually means checking in with you every 10 minutes or so to reassure you until help has arrived.
- If you don’t think you’re injured, but can’t get up, we’ll contact your next of kin first to see if they can go to you – and we’ll stay on the line with you until they have arrived.
- If we can’t get in touch with them or they’re unable to go to you, we’ll call 999 and ask for an ambulance. This is likely to be classed as a low priority call for the ambulance service and may take a number of hours before an ambulance arrives.
- If your fall happens between 8am and 8pm, we may be able to ask the Urgent Care Response team to go to you and attempt to safely lift you off the floor. This is normally within two hours of your fall.
- No matter which service is coming to you, we’ll keep the line open on the call throughout until help arrives.
- If we can’t get an answer from you when the alert is triggered, we’ll come out to you to see how you are. Once with you, we’ll follow the most appropriate steps depending on how you are as detailed above.
In the vast majority of falls cases, we’re able to contact the next of kin to go and help. In a minority we have needed to call an ambulance, which can result in a long delay waiting for it to arrive if the faller is uninjured.
This was unfortunately the case with the complaint we received. In this particular case, we got in touch with the next of kin as soon as we had received the alert. As they were unable to go to their Grandad, and he was uninjured but unable to get up and it was out of hours for the Urgent Care Response Team, we called the ambulance as per our standard procedure.
The request was classed as low-priority and it took five hours for the ambulance to arrive. Although this wait was completely out of our hands, in keeping with the way we deal with falls like these, we kept the line to the customer open throughout, regularly checking on him and providing reassurance until the ambulance arrived.