Yes / Inpatient falls are the most common safety incident reported by hospitals worldwide. Traditionally, responses have been guided by categorising patients' levels of fall risk, but multifactorial approaches are now recommended. These target individual, modifiable fall risk factors, requiring clear communication between multidisciplinary team members. Spoken communication is an important channel, but little is known about its form in this context. We aim to address this by exploring spoken communication between hospital staff about fall prevention and how this supports multifactorial fall prevention practice. Data were collected through semistructured qualitative interviews with 50 staff and ethnographic observations of fall prevention practices (251.25 hours) on orthopaedic and older person wards in four English hospitals. Findings were analysed using a framework approach. We observed staff engaging in 'multifactorial talk' to address patients' modifiable risk factors, especially during multidisciplinary meetings which were patient focused rather than risk type focused. Such communication coexisted with 'categorisation talk', which focused on patients' levels of fall risk and allocating nursing supervision to 'high risk' patients. Staff negotiated tensions between these different approaches through frequent 'hybrid talk', where, as well as categorising risks, they also discussed how to modify them. To support hospitals in implementing multifactorial, multidisciplinary fall prevention, we recommend: (1) focusing on patients' individual risk factors and actions to address them (a 'why?' rather than a 'who' approach); (2) where not possible to avoid 'high risk' categorisations, employing 'hybrid' communication which emphasises actions to modify individual risk factors, as well as risk level; (3) challenging assumptions about generic interventions to identify what individual patients need; and (4) timing meetings to enable staff from different disciplines to participate. / This research was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research Health Services and Delivery Research Programme (project number HSDR NIHR129488).

Every year, one out of three adults over the age of 65 falls, and about 30% of the falls result in moderate to severe injuries. The high rate of fall-related hospitalizations and the fact that falls are a major source of morbidity and mortality in older adults have motivated extensive interdisciplinary clinical and engineering research with a focus on fall prevention. This research is aimed at developing a medical Cyber Physical System (CPS) composed of a human supervised mobile robot and ambient intelligence sensors to provide continuous evaluation of environmental risks in the home. As a preventive measure to avoid falls, we propose use of mobile robots to detect possible fall risks inside a house. As a step-up to that, we also define a control framework for intelligent, networked mobile robots to semi-autonomously perform assistive and preventive tasks. This framework is integrated in a smart home that provides monitoring and control capabilities of environmental conditions such as objects blocking pathways or uneven surfaces. The main outcome of this work is the realization of this system at Worcester Polytechnic Institute's (WPI) @Home testbed.

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