Safe and Well Visits by the Fire and Rescue Service to Prevent Falls and Improve Quality of Life in Older People

Summary

Participation Requirements

Description

The Fire and Rescue Services routinely carry out around 670,000 fire safety check visits in England each year in people's homes. The aim of these 'Safe and Well Visits' is to reduce fire risks, support independent living, improve quality of life, and help prevent avoidable hospital admissions and ex...

The Fire and Rescue Services routinely carry out around 670,000 fire safety check visits in England each year in people's homes. The aim of these 'Safe and Well Visits' is to reduce fire risks, support independent living, improve quality of life, and help prevent avoidable hospital admissions and excess winter deaths. One part of the Safe and Well Visit is looking at ways to prevent falls. For some people, falling can cause serious health issues and in some cases may be fatal. About a third of people over the age of 65, and half of those over 80, will fall each year. Many of these falls happen at home. Falling may cause people to lose confidence, feel as if they have lost their independence and become withdrawn. About a fifth of all of the falls people have need medical attention. There were around 210,000 people admitted to hospital, as an emergency, in England in 2016 due to having had a fall. It costs the National Health Service (NHS) about £2.3 billion a year to treat patients who fall. The problem is likely to get worse as people are living longer. What investigators do not know is whether Safe and Well Visits undertaken by members of the Fire and Rescue Service reduce falls and can improve health-related quality of life and if they are good value for money. To find out if Safe and Well Visits reduce the number of falls older people have and improve their quality of life, investigators will conduct a trial. The investigators will recruit 1156 people aged 70 years and over from lists of people held on Fire and Rescue Service databases and allocate half of the people to receive a Safe and Well Visit at the start of the study. The visit will last about an hour and will be tailored to the risks of the people living in the household. The other half of the people will receive the Safe and Well Visit after 12 months (when they have finished the study). Everyone will receive a falls prevention leaflet from Age United Kingdom and their usual care from their General Practitioner and other health care professionals. Participants will be asked to fill in monthly falls calendars and three postal questionnaires over 12 months to collect information about falls, their quality of life, how often they have used NHS services, and whether they are doing any activities that make them more likely to have a fire in their home. This information may be collected over the phone or investigators may send questionnaires in the post. Researchers will analyse the data to find out if the Safe and Well Visits reduce falls and if they are good value for money. The investigators also want to find out if the Safe and Well Visits are acceptable to older people and to the Fire and Rescue Service. This will be explored through a series of in-depth interviews. The investigators will assess treatment fidelity using the following strategies: observations of those delivering the Safe and Well Visits; delivery inventory will be completed for each participant; participant outcome questionnaires will include information on adherence with the intervention; and interviews with trial participants and members of the Fire and Rescue Service who delivered the Safe and Well Visits. In addition to the main FIREFLI study investigators will undertake two additional trial methodological Studies within a Trial (SWAT) to evaluate one recruitment and one retention strategy. The first will test if using a recruitment invitation letter informed by Self-Determination Theory will increase the number of participants who take part in the study. The second will test if including a pen with the reminder four-month questionnaire will increase the number of postal questionnaires returned to the study team. Once the trial is completed, the investigators will make sure the results can be used by as many people as possible. They will send the people who took part in the study a summary of the findings, and the results will be presented at relevant conferences and published in scientific journals. Investigators will share these findings with other Fire and Rescue Services.

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