How to Reduce Falls in Your Senior Living Community

Do you need to reduce falls in your senior living community?

Falls are one of the top safety concerns in every senior living community. The bad news is, we can’t always avoid falls. The good news? There are many ways to reduce them and improve responses when they do occur.

Some of the common challenges that staff face include:

1. Local alarms can be tough to locate and cause disturbances for other residents.?
2. Expense is one of the biggest obstacles especially when the technology doesn’t work.
3. Resident interaction, such as pushing a pendant button or pulling a cord isn’t always possible.
4. Camera-based solutions raise privacy concerns and can’t be installed in every room such as a bathroom.
5. Unreliable technology leaves staff with false alarms and no knowledge if their systems are working or not.
6. Lack of reporting doesn’t provide proper visibility to the care being delivered.
7. No escalations with current systems leads to slow response times and bad outcomes for residents.
8. Fall detection solutions won’t integrate with the current nurse call system in place.

How can you reduce falls in your community?

1. Have an accurate fall detection system, like ONE? Watch, to help eliminate the guesswork.
2. Be proactive with high-risk residents by having a system that swiftly alerts staff when a resident tries to get out of bed on their own.
3. Have access to analytics that report how much time a resident spends in bed or a chair, or how many bathroom visits they make in a given period of time.
4. Utilize custom escalations that continuously alert staff until the call is responded to.
5. Prove realtime announcements and alerts to help staff respond faster to residents who have fallen.
6. Integrate ONE Watch with your wander control and access control systems.
7. Monitor system dashboards that show real-time statuses of who's taking the call and how long a resident has been waiting.
8. Use technology that is user-friendly for staff and accurately detects when a resident falls.

What is ONE? Watch?

ONE Watch is a camera-free solution that detects falls. Your residents will no longer need to wear devices or use other traditional fall detection solutions like pull cords or pressure pads.

ONE Watch utilizes an advanced high resolution 4D radar that constantly measures resident position to the floor throughout their entire living space. ONE Watch knows when a resident is lying in bed, sitting in a chair, or lying down on a sofa. The best part? It's constantly monitoring 24/7, but it doesn't use cameras. So residents can feel confident that their privacy and dignity is maintained.

Falls are detected by ONE Watch being able to sense where a body mass is in proportion to the floor. When a fall is detected, the appropriate staff members are immediately alerted via two-way radio or smartphone.

Since ONE Watch uses 4D radar, it can still detect falls even when objects are in the way. For example, a sofa is sitting in front of a large window and there's a walkway behind that for someone to be able to open the windows and move the blinds up and down. If a resident falls behind that sofa and a staff member were to walk by, they may assume that they are just in the bathroom, not that they have fallen behind the sofa. ONE Watch is able to detect that hidden fall and quickly alert your staff.

To learn more about how ONE Watch by Advanced Wireless Communications can help with the way your senior living community manages falls, contact us or click here.