Falls incident reporting: forms, protocols and auditing

Systematic approaches to reporting and auditing falls should be routine in residential aged care facilities to inform your falls prevention program. A falls incident report form can be used to gather standardised information about falls and fall-related injuries in your facility. Using a standard definition of 'a fall' makes reporting of falls more likely and more consistent. Click here for definitions of a fall.

A falls incident report form can document what happened when the person fell, the circumstances leading to the fall, contributing factors eg. medical condition, mobility, sensory deficits, and environmental factors, level of injury sustained, consequences of the fall and any actions taken or recommended. Incident report forms can help identify where falls most often occur, the time when falls most often occur, and the activities that precipitated most falls.

Following the completion of a series of incident report forms eg. Monthly, the data need to be reviewed and analysed, with feedback provided to staff, residents and families. An effective way of analysing falls, fall-related injuries and falls circumstances is by using an electronic database, which allows you to develop graphs. Graphing and analysing data about falls from incident report forms can provide:

• useful feedback for staff, residents, families and organisations about how they are progressing towards preventing falls and the number and severity of fall-related injuries, and

• a sound basis for informing preventive actions.

A template has been developed as part of the Victorian Quality Council falls prevention guidelines to assist those who do not have established electronic database systems for collecting and graphing falls incident form data (see Tools Supplement for instructions, and Falls Analysis - Demonstration weblink (Excel file)).

Staff may become discouraged when new reporting procedures are introduced. Awareness of the importance of reporting all falls may appear to increase the number of falls in the facility. However, other data, such as number of serious injuries, number of people who fall etc may decrease. It is important that you continue to report all falls and implement and review falls prevention interventions.

To assist you to effectively report falls incidents and analyse them, the following resources have been included:

• Incident report forms

• Incident report protocol

• Auditing tool