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Falls prevention project statistician wins conference prize

Work by the Oxford Academic Health Science Network with Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust and the NIHR Oxford Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care to evaluate a falls prevention initiative has won a national prize.

Falls predominantly affect older patients and can cause serious injury. An intervention in Bucks called ‘Stay in the bay’ helps hospital nurses spend more time within patient bays and less at central nurses’ stations. Mobile mini workstations were set up in bays on wards with high falls risk and high percentage of unobserved falls.

The ongoing research project aims to establish if this approach leads to a reduction in falls.

Staff from the Oxford AHSN’s Informatics and Clinical Innovation Adoption teams helped set up the project, arranging data-sharing documentation under the Oxford AHSN IG framework and establishing a secure NHS storage environment for data analysis and sharing anonymised incident data reports.

Usama Ali conference prize quote imageA poster presented by the project’s statistician, Usama Ali, at the Royal Statistical Society Young Statisticians annual conference was awarded the prize for best oral presentation. Usama said: “I am honoured to have received recognition for our research. It came as a surprise as it was the first time I have presented at a conference!”

As part of his prize, Usama will present the work at the RSS Annual Meeting in Glasgow later this year.