Nursing Homes Study of Fall Risk Assessment Oriented to Intervention

Overview

The aim of the study is to establish the impact of a falls screening questionnaire in the adoption of preventive interventions and eventually in the reduction of falls and its consequences in elder people living in nursing homes.

Falls are the most frequent accidents in nursing homes, affecting more than a third of residents each year. Up to 10% of fallers require hospitalization or suffer a fracture. Psychological consequences affects between 20 and 80% of fallers, which suffer a lack of self-confidence that leads to reduction of activities and an increase of the dependence in activities of daily living. Not all the residents have the same risk, and each person can have more than one risk factor that can be identified (previous falls, self confidence, weakness, gait disorders, dizziness, cognitive impairment, etc). Identification of risk factors is the first step to reduce falls, but is not enough by itself. For this reason, interventions directed towards the correction of identified risk factors are required. In this setting, multifactorial interventions are the most successful to reduce falls numbers and its consequences. As individual randomization of residents presents important inconveniences (group contamination, control arm residents could felt discriminated), we will randomized nursing homes to each group.

Conditions

Interventions

Eligibility

Locations (1)

Outcomes