Abstract
AbstractBackground: Geriatric Falls are considered as one of the serious public health problems, as they are common causes of morbidity mortality and poor quality of life. Health education intervention programs for fall prevention improves knowledge and number of falls among elderly.Aim: To assess risk of falling and home safety against falls among a group of elderly residents in Geriatric homes in Cairo, Egypt. Also, to explore the extent of falls` knowledge and evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention education program delivered to the elderly participants.Methods: A quasi-experimental interventional study was conducted upon 120 elderly participants in 7 geriatric homes in different districts in Cairo. The interview questionnaire included sociodemographic, general geriatric health, falls` risk assessment, geriatric home safety, falls` knowledge and falls` history sections. Educational Intervention was provided as a series of lectures to the elderly in the selected geriatric homes about falls related topics. Participants were interviewed for 3 times, before the intervention (pretest), after the intervention (posttest), and 6 months later (follow up posttest)Results: There was statistical significant improvement in the knowledge scores of geriatric participants regards different falls` topics in the posttest and follow up (6 months posttest) after implementation of the education intervention in comparison with the pretest scores (P=0.00). Elderly participants who experienced falling decreased from (35.8%) in the pre-test to (27.4 %) in the 6 months post-test after the education intervention.Conclusions: The health education intervention proved to be effective in increasing knowledge and reducing number of falls among geriatric participants.
Highlights
Geriatric Falls are considered as one of the serious public health problems, as they are common causes of morbidity mortality and poor quality of life
Participants fallsrisk awareness was assessed by fallsrisk awareness questionnaire (FRAQ) (15), other questions about fallsknowledge were added by the research team
Concerning fall risk assessment (FRA)among elderly participants, more than two third (69.2%) were at risk of falling, where the majority of the elderly participants (80.0%) mentioned that they'' pushed with their hands to stand up from a chair'', and more than half of which (59.2%) were ''worried about falling'' and ''had trouble to step up into a curb'', while (43.3%) sometimes feel unsteady during walking and more than one third (35.8%) experienced a previous fall in the last 6 months (Table 2)
Summary
Geriatric Falls are considered as one of the serious public health problems, as they are common causes of morbidity mortality and poor quality of life. Prevalence of falls among elderly in Egypt is estimated to be (33.3%) (2).Geriatric Falls are considered as one of the most common and serious public health problems, they are predictable and preventable events (6), preventing them can be challenging because of their multifactorial short and long-term causes (7) Elderly are often not aware of their own fall-risk or may realize their risk of falling but they have short of knowledge on how to prevent falls (8) Health education intervention programs for fall prevention improves knowledge, attitude, preventive behavior and number of falls among elderly(9) and can reduce the risk of their recurrent falls(10). To explore the extent of fallsknowledge and evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention education program delivered to the elderly participants
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
