Richmond upon Thames is making strides in supporting its older residents, particularly in falls prevention, according to a recent Health and Wellbeing Board meeting.
The board reviewed the 'Age Well' priorities within the Joint Local Health & Wellbeing Strategy (JLHWS), focusing on falls and frailty. Partnership working has contributed to Richmond's emergency falls rate for people 65+ being below the London average for 2024-25 and achieving the Better Care Fund ambition for 2024-25.
Falls and Frailty
Significant work has been undertaken to reduce emergency admissions related to falls for those aged 65 and over. Jenny Freeman and Brian Roberts, step leads for Falls & Frailty, reported that falls within care homes make up about a third of the falls seen in the borough.
To address this, the Richmond Health and Wellbeing Board is working to improve care home access to the Urgent Community Response (UCR) falls pickup service and embed falls acoustic monitoring into care homes through the SW London Integrated Care Board Enhanced health in care homes programme. Additional support is also being provided to care homes that have increased falls rates or no-pickup policies in place. These programs are tailored by using London Ambulance Service incidents data to support targeted work with care homes with higher rates of falls, or where LAS crews are called but the person does not need to be conveyed to hospital. This information is shared with NHS community service care home support teams to support increased usage of urgent community response services.
Kingston and Richmond NHS Foundation Trust has been working on a deconditioning quality priority, encouraging patients to be more active and staff to support patient independence. The 'deconditioning quality priority' has four workstreams which aim to address deconditioning in hospitals. The effectiveness is measured by the time between people being ready to be discharged and actually being discharged, which has reduced on average across all pathways for Richmond residents.
According to the Appendix 1 AGE Well Annual Report June2025, the emergency falls rate for people 65+ per 100,000 population (excluding transfers between hospital sites) is well below the London average for 2024-25.
The Health and Wellbeing Board continues to monitor these initiatives, aiming to improve the quality of life for older residents in Richmond upon Thames.
