Falls are a leading cause of patient harm across community settings, hospitals and residential aged-care facilities with most falls prevention strategies neither effective nor cost effective.

Since 2015 a passionate group of researchers, clinicians, hospital managers and consumers have been working collaboratively under the leadership of Professor Terry Haines, to enhance collective efforts to prevent falls across the Monash Partners network.

Recently this group secured a $1.1 million NHMRC ideas grant to lead a project investigating the effect of removing mobilisation alarms from use in hospital wards across six of our partner health service organisations. Read more here.

Priority areas have been established and a large mapping study of falls prevention strategies and investment across our six health service partners has been completed.

The study captured more than 5,000 episodes of routine care and identified areas for disinvestment due to a lack of benefit, including mobilisation alarms, designed to alert staff when a patient is attempting to mobilise and may be at risk of falling.

Further research is underway to guide disinvestment and ensure resources are directed toward strategies where there is evidence of patient benefit.

The short video below features Professor Terry Haines explaining the project.