Health and wellbeing Introduction Falls among the elderly

Running head: Health and wellbeing
Health and wellbeing
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1Health and wellbeing
Introduction
A fall can be defined as an event, that that makes a person come to rest inadvertently on
the ground or floor or other lower level. Fall related injuries can be both fatal and non-fatal. The
different types of falls among the elderly includes tripping on things, slipping on the floor either
due to the presence of some thing or falls related to delirium or other clinical conditions ( Jagnoor
et al., 2014).
The older adults are the most vulnerable group of the population, who are susceptible to
any kind of health care complications, possible malpractices and even ethical breaches in health
care (Lunenfeld & Stratton, 2013). The health and the wellbeing of the elderly patients depends
upon certain sectors and there are several performance indicators that proves that the needs of the
geriatric patients are being addressed (Asiri et al., 2018). One of such indicator is the rate of fall
prevention among the adults. Hence, mitigating the risk of fall prevention among the older adults
have been considered as an important step to promote health and wellbeing for the older adults
(Kalu, Vlachantoni & Norman, 2018). Slips and falls are one of the major concerns that has
contributed to the injury of the older people and loss of life worldwide warranting the
development of the fall prevention strategies among the health care professionals and the
physiotherapists (Dsouza, Rajashekar, Dsouza & Kumar, 2014). India has the world’s second
largest geriatric population that is about 1/8th of the total geriatric population all around the
globe. The prevalence of falls in the Indian older adults ranges within 15 % to 53 %.These
studies might vary in terms of sample size, the geographical region, the fall history criteria and
the methods. Conducting a community based cross sectional study, it was found that 31 % of the

2Health and wellbeing
elderly suffers from falls due to various reasons (Dsouza, Rajashekar, Dsouza & Kumar, 2014).
Each year about 4000 New Zealanders fall and break a hip. Falls and the injury rates rise with
the age and the figures increase for the people living over 75 who live in a community. In a New
Zealand study of people over 80, 37 percent of people has reported fall in a preceeding year and
7 % of those has four more falls.
This paper would discuss and evaluate the fall prevention strategies taken for the older
adults in the field of physiotherapy in both New Zealand and India. The paper would also give an
account of the legislation and policies related to this issue in New Zealand and India, followed
by some sets of recommendations to improve the practice.
Physiotherapy is an important part of the health care sector as they assist people affected
by illness, injury or disability by exercise, movement, manual therapy, advice and education. A
physiotherapist plays an important role in the preventing falls among the older adults by
designing structured exercise regimen for the older adults or by assisting the nutritionist to chalk
out proper diet as per their exercise regimen (Sherrington & Tiedemann, 2015).
Search strategy
Search engines like Google Scholar and electronic databases such as CINAHL, PubMed
and Cochrane library was being used for searching the wide variety of literatures. Cadore,
Rodríguez-Mañas, Sinclair & Izquierdo, (2013) has stipulated that before commencing a
literature research it is necessary to identify the keywords properly. The key words should be
able to portray the key concept of the research question. The following keywords have been used
for the conduction of the literary search:-

3Health and wellbeing
Keywords
Keywords Thesaurus terms Subject Headings
Fall prevention strategies in
India
Fall injury prevention
In India
Fall prevention
strategies
Physiotherapist Occupational
therapist
physiotherapist
Geriatric patients Elderly adults Geriatric patients
An inclusion and exclusion criteria was also included for getting the relevant literatures. The
inclusion and the exclusion criteria used has been provided in a table below:-
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
Inclusion Exclusion
Primary research, Systematic reviews
or Meta analyses
Private websites, blogs and opinions
Language: English
Year of publication: 2012 to 2019 Older than 2012
Articles and information from
relevant government websites
Boolean operators had also been employed for associating the words for the narrowing down or
broadening the results. The Boolean operator like AND and OR were used for ensuring that the
search results are specific. The literature research finally helped in the identification of 12
relevant articles that were chosen for the further analysis.
Search outcomes
Initially a Google search was done for getting an insight about the number of journal
articles available online. After setting the limiters like the year of publication, the result
numbered 12,323, which indicated that a wide variety of research papers are available online.
The grey literature mainly consisted of the government information and other information