Falls research rarely records the same details twice, systematic review finds, and proposes a standard reporting framework

A systematic review of 75 studies found that how researchers and services record the circumstances of a fall is highly inconsistent: individual reporting domains — such as where a fall happened, what the person was doing, or what time of day it occurred — were captured in anywhere from 7% to 95% of the reviewed studies Synthesis (Kehrer-Dunlap et al.1). To address this, the authors propose a standardised “6 W’s” framework — Who, Where, What, When, Why, and HoW — for interviewing patients and recording fall circumstances.

The review is a synthesis of existing reporting practice rather than a test of any single service’s data quality, so it does not establish how any specific falls service currently performs against the framework; it stops at proposing the tool.

For any service auditing or improving falls data — whether for a community falls-prevention programme or a frailty-identification pathway — the 6 W’s framework offers a ready-made, standardised template for improving comparability of circumstance data, rather than requiring a new one to be developed locally.