June 3, 2025

Helping to Prevent Falls in Older Adults: How Healthcare Professionals Can Help

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Brookdale Senior Living offers multiple care levels for seniors in more than 600 communities nationwide. Brookdale helps you find the right care plan for yourself or your loved one. With amenities such as transportation services, salons and private dining rooms and activities such as gardening, fitness classes and trivia nights Brookdale caters to a wide range of interests and needs.

Those of us who support and partner with older adults in their care must be vigilant and diligent in our efforts to help them avoid falling — and, if they do fall, to try to minimize the impact.

Adults 65 years and older face an increased fall risk, with an average of 1 in 4 reporting falling each year. About 37% of those falls require medical attention. Each year about 3 million older adults visit emergency rooms to receive treatment for a fall injury. Many require hospitalization.

Those of us who support and partner with older adults in their care must be vigilant and diligent in our efforts to help them avoid falling — and, if they do fall, to try to minimize the impact.

For older adults, falls can carry a higher likelihood of severe injury. Injuries such as hip fractures, head trauma and bruising can have serious consequences, such as:

Slow recovery
Potential loss of mobility and independence
Decreased quality of life
Threat of death — if not from the fall itself, then from trauma or complications such as blood clots, pneumonia or infection, resulting from extended immobility, surgery or preexisting health conditions

If you are a healthcare professional who treats older adults, or a care partner, you should be alert to potential fall hazards and act to remove them when possible. You should also support individuals in understanding how to help reduce the severity of any falls that do occur.

A range of factors can cause or contribute to a fall. Let’s consider them in two broad categories: physiological and environmental.

Physiological Fall Hazards

Physiological factors can be related to normal age-related changes or secondary to changes that occur as the result of disease processes. They include:

Reduced bone size and density
Loss of muscle strength and power
Reduced joint mobility
Changes in blood pressure, particularly a condition known as orthostatic hypotension, which can cause lightheadedness or dizziness when one stands
Issues with gait and balance, or coordination
A lack of vitamin D
Underlying conditions such as paroxysmal rapid atrial fibrillation, Parkinson’s disease or other neurological conditions, or dementia

In addition, certain medications — including some taken for anxiety or depression, prescription sleep medications, narcotics, and drugs for an overactive bladder — can increase one’s fall risk. That risk rises as more medications are used in combination.

Healthcare professionals treating older adults should pay close attention to physiological factors that might make their patients more prone to falling. Blood tests and gait and balance tests can help pinpoint areas of concern. Vitamin D supplements can help older bodies better absorb calcium for stronger bones and a reduced risk of fracture if a fall does occur; they can also help build muscle strength and coordination.

Environmental Fall Hazards

Environmental fall hazards are all around us. Some may be obvious, but others can be easy to overlook, which makes them even more dangerous.

Indoor hazards include clutter on floors, electrical cords, rugs (especially runners or accent rugs that can slide).
Outdoor hazards include cracked or uneven walkways; stairs, especially those lacking sturdy handrails; uneven surfaces such as gravel, trails with tree roots, and grass that camouflages divots or holes; and weather-created conditions, such as storm debris and slippery surfaces from rain and mud.
Insufficient lighting, indoors or out, can prevent individuals with normal age-related reductions in contrast sensitivity, or those with impaired vision, from seeing hazards.

Care partners should be alert to these hazards and remove them when possible, or otherwise help older adults avoid or carefully navigate them.

The Role of HCPs

Healthcare professionals, because of their central role in promoting older adults’ well-being, should act to help reduce the frequency and severity of falls. Education should be a vital component of these efforts, helping patients know what to do before (preventing a fall), during (reducing the severity of a fall as it is happening) and after (assessing the underlying cause of) a fall.

While fall prevention is the ideal, that is not always possible. Older patients should understand that when a fall is inevitable, they can lessen its seriousness by keeping their knees and elbows bent; avoiding falling with their full weight on their outstretched hands; landing on more muscular parts of the body, such as their buttocks, back or thighs; protecting their head; and, if possible, relaxing instead of tensing up as they fall.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends a fall prevention approach known as STEADI, which stands for Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths & Injuries. The core elements are:

Screen patients for fall risk.
Assess modifiable risk factors.
Intervene to reduce fall risk by using effective strategies.

Strategies include encouraging proper diet and exercise, regular eye and feet checkups, periodic reviews of medications, and educating about fall-proofing the patient’s home.

Working With Senior Living Communities

Collaboration with the residential communities where your older patients live can help keep everyone involved with their care aware of developments and areas of concern. Together they can develop and implement both standardized and individualized fall risk assessment and management programs.

They can also discuss hazard removal and the addition of safety features, and maintain regular communication about strategies.

Brookdale Senior Living communities, which prioritize resident health and safety, have developed a falls management program based on their clinical expertise and CDC recommendations.

Learn More

To find out more about how Brookdale can help keep your patients safe from falls and other preventable events, reach out to us. Together, we can help keep our older adults safer.

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