Falls Prevention Support in Primary Care draft version 1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Falls prevention support in primary care: co-production of a falls prevention checklist
IRAS ID
339840
Contact name
Elizabeth Orton
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Nottingham
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
000, NA
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 4 months, 17 days
Research summary
Falling in the elderly causes injury, pain, loss of confidence and independence. However, if those at risk of falling are identified early then relatively simple measures can be taken to lower their risk. Social prescribers in GP practices and community settings are in a good position to help prevent falls in adults by identifying those at risk and helping them to take action. However currently there isn’t a standardised way of doing this. The aim of this study is to produce a falls prevention checklist that will help social prescribers identify adults at risk of falling and support action to be taken. This will be achieved in two stages:
Co-production sub-study: developing and refining a draft falls prevention checklist and user training via focus groups with practitioners who undertake social prescribing (referred to as "practitioners" for the rest of this document) and service users.
Acceptability sub-study: Practitioners will attend training to use the draft checklist and complete a training assessment questionnaire. They will then deliver the draft falls prevention checklist to service users. Both groups will then complete acceptability questionnaires to evaluate the checklist. The data will be used to refine the falls prevention checklist and user training further to produce a prototype.
This study will involve multiple NHS and non-NHS sites to recruit participants. Eligible candidates include social prescribers or practitioners who undertake social prescribing as part of their role, and service users who are at risk of having a fall. The prototype falls prevention checklist that we develop will be used in a future study to test how feasible it would be to do a large trial where we compare falls risk in people who are offered this falls assessment and action, versus those who are not. This study has been funded by NIHR School of Primary Care Research.
REC name
Wales REC 6
REC reference
24/WA/0176
Date of REC Opinion
7 Jun 2024
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion