Elsevier

Preventive Medicine

Volume 47, Issue 5, November 2008, Pages 554-558
Preventive Medicine

How likely are older people to take up different falls prevention activities?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2008.09.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Objective

To determine the extent to which older people are willing to engage in different falls prevention activities, and how this may vary in different sectors of the older population.

Methods

A survey sent to patients aged over 54 in ten general practices in the Southampton, Bristol and Manchester areas of the UK in 2006 yielded 5,440 respondents. The survey assessed willingness to attend classes of strength and balance training (SBT), carry out SBT at home, or accept support to reduce home hazards. Participants were asked their gender, age, education, home tenure, ethnic group, and how often they had fallen during the past year.

Results

Over 60% of the sample would consider doing SBT at home and 36.4% said they would definitely do SBT at home. Only 22.6% would definitely attend group sessions and 41.1% would definitely not attend. Older age, recent falls and lower socioeconomic status were associated with a greater willingness to carry out SBT at home (but not in classes) and accept help with home hazards.

Conclusions

Health promotion programmes should give prominence to home-based performance of SBT as a method of encouraging the entire older population to engage in falls prevention, including those most in need.

Section snippets

Sample

Participants were recruited from ten general practices in the Southampton, Bristol and Manchester areas in 2006. Since respondents with socio-economic deprivation are less likely to respond to surveys (Picavet, 2001, Turrell et al., 2003), we purposely sampled practices with higher rates of socio-economic deprivation, to ensure that sufficient numbers of people from deprived social groups were represented in the survey despite lower uptake rates. Nine of the practices were selected because they

Results

Responses to the three items asking whether respondents were likely to attend group sessions of SBT, undertake SBT at home or make home modifications are shown in Table 1. More people were willing to consider doing SBT at home than in a group; over 60% of the sample were willing to consider carrying out SBT at home and only 20% definitely would not do so. Conversely, only around 40% would consider doing SBT in a group while over 40% definitely would not. Cross-tabulation of preferences for

Discussion

Carrying out SBT at home proved to be the most popular method of falls prevention. Older age and recent falls were associated with a greater reported likelihood of undertaking SBT at home, as would be expected. Older age and recent falls were also associated with a much greater reported likelihood of accepting home modifications, suggesting that this fall prevention strategy is viewed as most relevant by those at highest risk. The finding that older people may be willing to participate in these

Conclusions

These findings suggest that health promotion programme should give prominence to home-based performance of strength and balance training as a method of encouraging the entire older population to engage in falls prevention. From our survey it seems that home-based exercise has the widest appeal, and is also most attractive to those older and more socially deprived people who have the greatest need for undertaking falls prevention measures.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgments

The study was funded by the Department of Health contract number 001/00013. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Health.

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