In most care homes, care staff spend their night shifts opening the door to every resident’s room to check that they’re okay. This often wakes up residents who then try to get out of bed, creating a falls risk. Or at the very least, these checks frequently disturb their sleep. This upsets their natural day/night rhythm resulting in a range of negative health and wellbeing impacts.

We installed our first acoustic system at Drovers House as a trial in 2016 - in fact this was the first use of acoustic monitoring in the UK, a system that has been used in Europe for decades. The system, used with resident consent, listens for noises from each room, sending an alert to a central monitoring system if a sound threshold is broken. The monitoring carers can respond appropriately and send a carer to support residents if they need help, or they can let people settle themselves back to sleep independently.

Within a year we evidenced a 34% reduction in night-time falls. This was because people were left to sleep undisturbed by door-knocking, and we could get to them quickly if they needed our help. Because people were sleeping better they were more alert during the day, ate better and did more exercise. This resulted in an overall reduction in falls, over days and nights, of 55%.

We introduced cameras as another trial in 2017, starting with six residents at Castle Brook. Demand for cameras from customers quickly grew because they could see that being able to see what was happening in the room gave the night staff even more information to inform their care decisions. The camera is not on all the time and does not record - it simply provides a live feed when a noise trigger from the room is checked by the night monitoring team. The addition of cameras has helped to reduce falls at night even more, and shown that some incidents, that were previously unwitnessed and therefore had to be treated as a fall, are in fact not falls, for example, someone lowering themselves safely to the floor. This reduces unnecessary calls for ambulances and the emotional worry that an unwitnessed event has for everyone concerned.

More and more providers are now adopting acoustic monitoring across the country. And the NHS Digital Transformation Fund has awarded grants to install this technology because reducing falls in care homes benefits the wider healthcare system.