Intervention may help some prevent falls

MELBOURNE, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- Educational intervention helped some elderly patients avoid falls, an Australian researcher says.

Study co-author Terry Haines of Monash University in Melbourne says more than 1,200 older patients at two Australian hospitals were randomly placed in three groups.

One group of 401 received the complete intervention, involving written materials, videos and one-on-one follow-up with a health professional at the patient's bedside. A group of 424 patients received only the materials from the program and no individual follow-up, and a group of 381 received usual care, which varied by hospital but usually consisted of risk screening, use of alert items such as wrist bands and generic interventions such as checklists.

The study, scheduled to be published in the March print issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, found 247 participants fell and 97 sustained injuries, including five fractures. Overall, the rate of falls per 1,000 days per patient did not differ significantly among the three groups, Haines said.

However, among the 906 participants who did not have cognitive impairment, falls were less frequent among those who received the complete intervention program group than among those in the materials-only group or the control group.