What is falls prevention?
What is a fall?
What a fall is not
How do we prevent falls in older people?
Risk factors and falls
Falls prevention is about eliminating or reducing the risk of physical and psychological harm associated with falls in older people, as well as promoting healthy active ageing.
It involves determining what the community as a whole can do and how all members can work together to make Queensland homes and communities safer for older people and their families.
By learning how to assist older people address the causative factors of falls, we can help them stay healthy, active and independent.
The following provides definitions of falls, injury prevention, healthy active ageing and safety promotion:
Falls prevention for older people has received this attention because:
The World Health Organisation defines a fall as "inadvertently coming to rest on the ground, floor or lower level, excluding intentional change in position to rest in furniture, wall or other objects" [31].
Falls in older people cover a wide range of events including:
Falls have significant physical and emotional impacts on older people and the cumulative effect of the number of falls in our community has a major impact on our hospitals.
Queensland already spends more than twice as much on the treatment of falls in older people than on victims of road traffic crashes. And the issue of falls will only grow as the population ages.
We need to act now by taking a collaborative and coordinated approach to preventing falls. This can be achieved by building on the work already undertaken in the community, encouraging the uptake of physical activity, good nutrition [36] and a range of other protective strategies at a population and individual level.
Falls in older people are not accidents.
The word 'accident' has several meanings including:
Falls in older people are not accidents. Similarly, falls are not an inevitable or unavoidable part of life. The causes of a fall can be identified and the sequence of events leading up to the fall can be foreseen.
Falls in older people can usually be predicted and should not be regarded as accidents.
In order to stop older people from falling we need to know the following:
In order to reduce the consequences of a fall, we need to consider:
Research has identified a number of identifiable risk factors that increase the chances of an older person falling.
These risk factors can be classified in a number of ways [56]. One of the well known methods is to classify the risk factors as either personal (intrinsic) or environmental (extrinsic).
Intrinsic or personal risk factors include the following [67]:
Extrinsic or environmental risk factors include the following [67]:
To be successful in preventing falls in older people, work needs to be done to address the following issues:
There are a number of other theories and models that can be used in falls prevention, including:
Effective falls prevention for older people using any of these theories or models still requires the use of a systematic project management approach. This will help to plan for quality implementation, including the identification of potential threats or risks that could jeopardise the success of the falls prevention program/project.
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