Community falls service produces ‘significant’ improvements in patients

Our West London Falls Prevention Service was recently the focus of an article in the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy - 'Community falls service produces 'significant' improvements in patients'.

The article focuses on how clinical outcome measures showed that the West London falls service had 'significantly improved' the health of patients. 

Our Falls Prevention Service which operates in Barnet, Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea and in Westminster uses four commonly-used measurements on patients discharged from CLCH between April to June.

Our physiotherapist, Judith Cohen is quoted in the article, which details how all participants were assessed before and after our 12-week rolling programme of falls groups.

At the end of the programme people had improved their balance by nearly seven points on the Berg Balance Scale. Timed Up and Go, a simple and reliable test of a person's risk of falls, showed an average improvement of nearly seven seconds across the group.

The Sit to Stand in 30 seconds test showed people achieved an average improvement of more than three repetitions of being able to sit to stand unaided from a low chair. And scores rose from an average of seven to 28 points on the Falls Efficacy Scale International, an assessment of the fear of falling.