Helping customers who have had a fall and saving the NHS thousands

We receive thousands of calls every year from people who have had a fall. If someone is injured, we will contact an ambulance and get assistance to our customer as soon as possible. But this is not always the case.

If you have had a fall and you’re not injured, you may still struggle to get back to your feet. If we can get in touch with a family member or friend nearby, we will ask them to help, if they feel they can.

We have a team of trained officers who can come out to help if your family or friends are not able to help. This is called our Falls Lifting service.

What is the Falls Lifting service?

We began working on a Falls Lifting pilot project on behalf of the Nottingham City Urgent Care Board in July 2019.

Before this pilot began, we would have had to call an ambulance for any customer reporting they had had a fall.

If you have had a fall, but are uninjured, you could face a wait of up to eight hours for an ambulance. This is due to high demand and a need to prioritise callouts. It was our aim to use this pilot to try and avoid lengthy waits on the floor for vulnerable residents.

The Board gave us funding to purchase specialist equipment. This clever equipment enables us to safely and swiftly lift someone who has had a fall, back to their feet.

How do we do it?

We have a fleet of vehicles waiting to get to you if you have had a fall. We will be there as quickly as we can. In fact, over the course of our pilot, we reached our customers in an average of 19 minutes.

We carry out a full assessment before attempting to lift anyone, as we don’t want to risk injury. If we feel you might be injured, then we will contact the emergency services for assistance. At this point we can more accurately report if an ambulance is needed.

We will use our specialist equipment to get you to a safe upright position, if we feel it is safe to do so. See our video to see how this is done.

We have lifted 68 uninjured fallers since the service went live in mid-July 2019.

So far, we have prevented the need for an ambulance to be called in 63 of these instances. This has saved the NHS an estimated £12,500. More importantly the service has avoided length waits on the floor for vulnerable people.

We have received some fantastic feedback for this service. We’re delighted to report that we will be continuing to offer this to all our customers on an ongoing basis.

For more information on the support packages available to you, click here.