Barriers and facilitators for implementing safety flooring for injury prevention in long-term care

This project gathered feedback from a range of stakeholder groups regarding safety flooring, and potential barriers and facilitators for implementing this technology within care facilities.

Gaining the perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups is an imperative element of implementation processes. Recently, a commercially available safety flooring product was installed in the Safety Flooring Lab at the Research Institute for Aging (i.e. pilot installation). This allows stakeholders to directly interact with safety flooring technology (e.g. stand, walk on it), which should improve the richness and value of insights from team members. In this specific project, we will leverage the ‘pilot installation’ and use a short 2-page survey (which employs an experience sampling method) to gain further insights into potential barriers and/or facilitators for implementation of safety flooring in residential care environments. We are including a broad group of stakeholders (beyond front-line workers) to explore a rich set of user perspectives. This broader inclusion criteria supports gathering perspectives from people who represent care staff, cleaning staff, rehabilitation staff, facility designers, managerial staff, and non-Schlegel Village staff at the facility (e.g. Research Institute for Aging team members).