Inpatient falls and fall-related injuries continue to be the largest category of reported incidents in the acute care setting. Falls occur in many settings: In one week, my colleague received four calls about falls: a young brain injured woman who fell off a treadmill at home while under the care of an aide, an elderly woman who fell getting off an examining table in a doctor’s office, a woman who fell in the hospital just before the nurse reached her side, and a man who fell walking out an adult …

The National Electronic Injury Surveillance System All Injury Program, supported by the Centers for Disease Control, tracks data from a representative sample of hospital emergency departments (EDs).  This dataset was recently analyzed1 to reveal the circumstances of injurious falls and the assistive devices that were involved, yielding estimates that:

Each year in the US there are 47,312 nonfatal fall injury ED visits associated with the use of canes and walkers by people 65+ years of age;  60% of these happen at home.

The injuries sustained in these falls are serious with …

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The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) reports results from analyses of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project-Nationwide Emergency Department Sample regarding ED visits among elderly adults who were coded as sustaining both a fall and an injury.  Starting from the vantage point of the ED these analyses highlight the importance of our efforts to reduce falls and illuminate how injurious falls contribute to human suffering, ED overcrowding, hospital costs, admission to long term care facilities as well as private and government health care spending.  Having sustained …

It has become more common for older Americans to be hospitalized for seemingly acute illnesses. Sometimes the illness may only require a short stay in the hospital, other times it requires a lengthy stay or a repeat admission. Such instances make this population even more vulnerable to falls, independence in caring for themselves, and their mobility.  It has been noted by investigators that those older adults who have longer or frequent hospital stays have an increased risk of fracture, a loss of their independence in activities of daily living, and …