Falls in English and Welsh hospitals: a national observational study based on retrospective analysis of 12 months of patient safety incident reports

Abstract

This paper describes the largest retrospective study of hospital falls incidents and draws on data from almost 500 institutions of varying types. It describes wide variations in falls recording and reporting, and in recorded falls rates between institutions of different types and between institutions of ostensibly similar case-mix. As falls are the commonest reported patient safety incident, there is a pressing need for improvements in local reporting, recording and focused analysis of incident data, and for these data to be used at local and national level better to inform and target falls prevention, as well as to explore the reasons for large apparent differences in falls rates between institutions.