Post-Fall Huddle

What?

A post-fall huddle is an opportunity to create a safe environment to understand the ’story’ behind a fall in order to learn and take action to prevent a future fall.

Why?

The goals of a post-fall huddle are to identify the factors that contributed to the patient fall, and to identify the actions necessary to prevent another fall for that patient. A post-fall huddle allows the patient, family, and staff to gather as a team to learn from a fall event. A huddle may also point toward changes that should be made in your program, overall.

How?

There are a variety of post-fall huddle tools and guides publicly available for use. Consider adopting a tool that encourages open dialogue among the patient, family, and staff to discuss the fall. Tools that serve as post-incident investigation checklists may be useful for more in-depth investigations of fall events, but are not necessarily designed to elicit the rich conversation intended to occur within a post-fall huddle.