Adopting the Fall Fighter scheme

Company: NRS Healthcare

Achievement: Making Fall Fighter training mandatory for all staff

Background: NRS Healthcare is one of the largest UK providers of community equipment, wheelchairs and clinical services to the NHS and Local Authorities.

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Challenge: Simon Jones, Head of Health and Safety and the Environment at NRS Healthcare, said: “I took up my role in May 2022 and very early on I was set the brief by the company CEO to move the company safety culture forward from 'compliance to commitment', so we produced a new H&S policy and set of objectives that reflected this new approach. As well as looking at H&S issues for our own people, we also wanted to look at ways we could influence H&S for our service users.”

Results: Simon Jones said: “The Fall Fighter campaign jumped out straight away as being a great way to do this and raise awareness, as it is a perfect fit for our core business activities that provide disability and living aids for our most vulnerable people and look to prevent falls. We therefore made it a core objective to adopt Fall Fighter as our business-wide H&S campaign.

“With the help of our Learning and Development team, we added the Fall Fighter learning materials to our own online Learning and Skills Academy and introduced it to the business via an internal marketing communications campaign. We initially made the training voluntary but have now had the backing from the CEO to make the training mandatory so that we reach as many people as possible.

“I have introduced the campaign via my H&S video updates I produce every two weeks to help with engagement and also posted updates via my LinkedIn page. NRS is a large business with over 1,000 employees, so reaching everyone is the biggest challenge. As of August 2023, we have 824 people who have completed the training, including the CEO.

“Feedback from our own people has been positive, many of them can see how the campaign fits with our business and are interested to be involved. We are also starting to let our commissioners know about the campaign and our support for it, which is great to help grow awareness and support falls prevention.”

August 2023

“Feedback from our own people has been positive, many of them can see how the campaign fits with our business and are interested to be involved.” - Simon Jones, NRS Healthcare