Hospitals have complex and detailed plans to reduce falls but these are not always easy to follow or adopt across the wider hospital environment. We worked with Maria Tipper, clinical lead for falls and safe mobility at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, to help staff – including nurses, doctors and therapists – understand the different falls ‘pathways’ and connect with the updated Falls policy.

“The designs have been really well received with lots of wards using them as hoped, and it has really helped clarify expectations.”

Maria Tipper, Clinical Lead for Falls and Safe Mobility, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust

To support the project we ran a co-design session with a group of Imperial’s clinical and health and safety staff to share initial design provocations and to learn more about what matters to the team and how they would like to be supported in the future.

This led to the design of a series of infographics that break down safe mobility into a series of ‘falls tools’ that can be accessed through Imperial’s online portal or be printed out to support informal and formal learning styles.

A key design aim was to move the focus from dealing with falls to implementing the different ways to support safe mobility. This was partly achieved by a change in language, but also through the development of easy to use safe mobility assessment tools that visualise steps and activities. 

We created a live online resource that can be hosted on the Trust’s website to link to these tools and designed this so that individual tools could be accessed online or downloaded as printable PDFs. A printed version can also be kept on hospital wards for easy access.

If you are involved in health and safety challenges in hospitals or the community and would like to use design to bring your knowledge to life, please do get in touch.