Featured Review: Interventions for preventing falls in older people in care facilities and hospitals

How effective are interventions designed to reduce falls in older people in care facilities and hospitals?Falls by older people in care facilities, such as nursing homes, and hospitals are common events that may cause further loss of independence, injuries, and sometimes death as a result of injury. Effective interventions to prevent falls are therefore important.Many types of interventions are in use. These include:exercisemedication interventions that include vitamin D supplementationmedication review of the drugs that people are takingenvironment or assistive technologies including bed or chair alarms or the use of special (low/low) bedssocial environment interventions that target staff members and changes in the organisational system, and knowledge interventionsA special type of intervention is the multifactorial intervention, where the selection of single interventions such as exercise and vitamin D supplementation is based on an assessment of a person ' s risk factors for falling.A recentCochrane Review looked at the outcomes of rate of falls (number of falls over time), risk of falling (number of fallers), number of people with fall-related fractures, and adverse events.This review included 95 randomised controlled trials involving 138,164 participants. Seventy-one trials (40,374 participants) were in care facilities, and 24 (97,790 participants) in hospitals. On average, participants were 84 years old in care facilities and 78 years old in hospitals. In care facilitie...

Source: Cochrane News and Events - September 7, 2018 Category: Information Technology Authors: Muriah Umoquit Source Type: news