Why I joined the FRAMES project, by Tina Frost

 

I joined the Lay Researcher Group for the FRAMES project because three years ago I spent time in a leading hospital after a bad head injury resulting from a fall and wanted to do something in return for the excellent care I received.

Learning from experience

My involvement in the group has led me to think more about how falls in and out of hospital can happen - or in many cases, do not happen - and what we can learn from this. As I used to teach communications to pre-nursing students in a FE college I thought that a training exercise based on personal case studies of when falls had or had not occurred could help with analysis, development of communication skills and empathy, so I compiled some based on my own experiences. I have no medical training and realise that the present COVID crisis may mean this is of no use of course...but I’m trying!

The small case studies I wrote went back a long way, from the birth of my first child in hospital (when I had a fall) to when I and my husband were caring for our elderly mothers until they died in hospital in their nineties. Here’s an example, from a time when I was a patient in a large hospital known for head injury treatment after a bad fall. I waited until everyone was asleep in my ward before quietly taking myself to the bathroom to wash my hair and shower. I thought nothing about this: as far as I was concerned, I’d had privacy and had not taken up nurses’ time, and I felt much better. It was only much later that I realised how dangerously I had behaved and how easily I could have fallen again and hurt myself.  No one mentioned it at the time (or did they?), but I learned from my family later that I’d been assessed as being unable to identify night or day (I took my shower at about 2am!), though to be fair back then I could probably not have explained my timing. This, and other assessments done later, have made me realise how crucial the timing of assessment is to the stages of illness.  It also made me reflect on how important empathy and communication are, as well as the help of carers, friends and family. 

Every patient is different of course. I have learnt a lot about assessing patients’ needs and finding out what could help them from my own experiences and observing the others I was with. For example, we spent three months doing rota duty with my mother-in-law in a large geriatric ward in a teaching hospital and I was with her when she died at 5am.  I realised how anxious so many of the patients were and am now able to think of practical ways some of them could have been helped more.  Overall, involvement with the FRAMES Lay Researcher Group and with the Age Friendly group in Leeds has made me realise how lucky I have been.  It also inspired me to start pulling things together that I’d not thought of before.

Helping to prevent falls

Discussion in the FRAMES Lay Researcher Group group has led me to a lot of personal analysis. Jamil’s moving account of how he and his family cared for his mother and Eva’s observations that - however careful and caring everyone can be - a lot of accidents can be caused by almost obvious things has made me think of all the occasions when falls could have been prevented or just avoided. This led me to reassess the case studies I did originally and pick out many more factors for analysis that I think might be of some help.  So I’m carrying on with this approach and hope it may be of use somehow.