March 30, 2023 | Terry Smith

How Do ICBs Implement HelpFall And The Raizer Lifting Chairs?

In the recent ‘Going Further for Winter‘ guidance released in 2022 by NHS England, the NHS states – “Not all falls result in serious injury, and a proportion of falls can be responded to by community-based response services, supporting NHS statutory services such as ambulance services to prioritise higher acuity patients.”

As mentioned in the guidance, NHS Integrated Care Boards across the country are implementing Raizer Lifting Chairs alongside the HelpFall Post-Falls Decision Support Tool into community-based services, which is helping them to:

Enhance the outcomes and experience for those who fall, by improving initial response times and reducing the risk of long lies
Improve system efficiency, focusing ambulance capacity where it is needed most and building on existing community-based provider models.

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Where do ICBs typically implement HelpFall and the Raizer Lifting Chairs?

Level One Falls: Community First Responders and other community services

A level one response to a fall can be described as a non-clinical response, where the person who has fallen has been clinically triaged as having no injury or illness but requires some level of assistance to avoid poor outcomes and long lies (AACE Falls governance framework).

For level one responses, ICBs and ambulance trusts are upskilling and equipping Community First Responders (CFRs) to respond to non-injury falls in the community, putting critical ambulance hours back into the system and enabling a faster response to higher-priority incidents.

Case Study: East of England Ambulance Service upskilled their CFR groups and equipped them with Raizer Lifting Chairs, which is empowering CFRs to improve patient outcomes and improve system efficiency.

Case Study: South Western Ambulance Service’s CFR teams are reducing response times and improving the quality of care for fallen patients.

Training and equipping other community-based and TEC responder services such as telecare and domiciliary care organisations to safely assess and respond to non-injury falls is also proving very powerful in reducing wait times for fallers and reducing the impact these falls have on the wider system.

Case Study: Home Instead East Devon expanded their services to offer falls response for their clients, taking the burden off the ambulance service.

By ensuring these community-based response services have access to the appropriate lifting equipment, assessment tools, and training, and ensuring that there are clear onward referral processes into existing support pathways, ICBs are greatly improving the outcomes of non-injury falls, both for the patients and for the system.

Level Two Falls: Urgent Community Response Teams

A level two response to a fall would include falls with a minor injury or illness which require attendance from a healthcare professional for further assessment but may not require admission to a hospital.

The most appropriate level-two response to minor injury falls is through the use of Urgent Community Response Teams, which, whilst a relatively new concept, have quickly become a key part of NHS England’s Urgent and emergency care policies, due to their effectiveness in reducing system pressure and enabling emergency services to concentrate their resources on higher priority incidents.

Case Study: How Dorset UCRT are using Raizer Chairs to keep 80% of Fallers in Their Own Homes

Case Study: How Mid & South Essex UCRT are using the Raizer to respond to minor-injury falls and reduce pressure on the Ambulance service

With the appropriate clinical training, community-based services such as CFRs and TEC responder services can also be upskilled to provide level-two responses to falls in the community.

Care Homes

Falls are three times more common among care home residents than in people of a similar age living in their own homes¹, and up to 40% of admissions from care homes are falls-related².

In the ‘Going Further for Winter’ guidance, NHS England state that ‘Partnerships between independent equipment providers, ICBs, ambulance services and care homes have been shown to safeguard residents who fall, support care-home staff in their decision making after a person has fallen and to reduce the cost of post-fall responses to the health and social care system’.

As the below case studies show, enabling and upskilling care home staff to safely assess and respond to falls has significant benefits for care home residents, ambulance services, and the system as a whole.

Case Study: How Mid and South Essex Health Care Partnership have Reduced Ambulance Callouts to Care Homes by 69%

Case Study: How HelpFall Is Transforming Post Falls Management In Care Homes | The SNEE ICB Story

What results are ICBs seeing from these projects?

By implementing Raizer Lifting Chairs and HelpFall into community-based response services and care homes, ICBs are taking the burden of minor injury and non-injury falls off ambulance services.

Referring back to the beginning of this article, this is enabling ICBs to achieve the aims set out in the Going Further for Winter guidance from NHS England:

Enhance the outcomes and experience for those who fall, by improving initial response times and reducing the risk of long lies
Improve system efficiency, focusing ambulance capacity where it is needed most and building on existing community-based provider models.

Each of the case studies referenced above go into detail about the impact and results the projects have had.

How does Felgains support ICBs with implementation?

Beyond simply providing equipment, we are passionate about offering all the implementation support you require to make the project as successful as possible.

Initial scoping and onboarding

We can support you in your initial scoping out of where and how equipment should be implemented, and how to maximise the budgets allocated, sharing our learnings from the projects we’ve worked on previously.

For care home projects, we provide support with onboarding care homes into the project, communicating with the care homes to register their interest and get Memorandums of Understanding signed.

Training

As standard, we would offer face-to-face product training for both the Raizer lifting chairs and HelpFall, which typically would be in a ‘train-the-trainer’ format. For care home projects, this would typically involve a training session for each care home involved in the project, on the delivery of the chair.

Support with feedback and reporting

Especially in the case of care home projects, we offer to communicate with the parties involved to collect and collate qualitative and quantitative feedback for the ICB, which can then be used when reporting on project KPIs and when putting together a business case for project expansion.

By implementing HelpFall, you have an opportunity to receive quarterly insights reports, which give a clear and accurate analysis of the causes and outcomes of falls, enabling the ICB to put appropriate falls prevention programmes and interventions in place.