Background Injury is one of the most serious threat to public health. Among them, Falls have always been playing a pivotal role in the cause of injury, especially for elder people. So we evaluate the epidemiologic features of falls injury and death among elders in China during January 2008 to December 2013, and expect to provide reference for the prevention and treatment.

Methods Injury and death data of falls were collected from the monitoring death surveillance data sets in national disease surveillance system and hospital based national injury surveillance data sets, which published by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. SPSS software version 17.0 was used for descriptive analysis.

Results The National Disease Surveillance Points system (DSP) data base showed that in 2008–2013, fall-related mortality among elderly person is fluctuating from 41.75/100,000 to 48.22/100,000, which was about six times than that among the whole population. The fall-related mortality increased with ages, so did the proportion of fall-related death to injury death. Furthermore, to different age groups, the proportion of fall-related death to injury death of males fluctuated from a low of 29.5 percent to a high of 32.8 percent. The ratio of female fall-related death obviously increased with age, in 65–69 years old group, 75–79 years old group, and the 85 years old and over group, the ratio was 6.6%, 18.1% and 79.4% respectively. For those patients admitted to hospital for injury, fall is the most important reason. Elderly people makes up 54.4% to 56.6% of all the injury cases, which is higher than the ratio in whole-population (30.1% − 36.1%).The proportion of elders fall-related cases to injury cases also showed a growing trend with age.

Conclusions The aged people is the susceptible population of fall injury with a high mortality. Those people with advanced ages, especially those females are the main concern of fall-related injury.