Fall Prevention and Application of Exercise as Intervention

Running head: HEALTH AND WELLBEING
FALL PREVENTION AND APPLICATION OF EXERCISE AS INTERVENTION
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1HEALTH AND WELLBEING
Introduction
As per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2019), one of the leading
causes of severe injuries and physical health complications is falling. Fall could be
determined as a situation in which the affected individual comes to resting state inadvertently
due to which their physical and mental health gets affected severely. The severity of this
condition, could be identified from the fact that fall is the second leading cause of increased
morbidity and mortality among the world population. Further the World Health Organisation
(2019) mentioned that every year more than 646000 people die of fall or related accidents
and within these, 80% of the cases are observed in the low or moderate income countries. It
was also observed that every year 37 million falls are registered around the in which, 90%
cases arte sever and majority of the affected individuals are above the age of 65.
Due to these expansion of healthcare risk related to fall among elderly people,
physiotherapeutic intervention should be implemented as El-Khoury et al. (2013) observed
majority of the falls among elderly population occurs due to improper balance, inability to
maintain a healthy and active lifestyle and loss of consciousness. Hence, the interventions for
fall prevention among elderly population should include physiotherapeutic interventions or
exercises so that the balance and consciousness among the elderly population could be
developed and their fall related episodes could be minimised (Uusi-Rasi et al., 2015).
The primary aim of this paper is to develop a PICOT question related to
physiotherapeutic intervention for the fall prevention among the elderly population and in this
aspect the research papers related to this PICOT question would be searched with systematic
review. Hence, a search strategy and Prisma diagram for the search strategy would be
developed. Further, in this aspect, with the help of the literatures, the national and local health

2HEALTH AND WELLBEING
policies of New Zealand so that the significance of this proposed intervention could be
discussed.
PICOT question
Population Intervention Comparison Outcome Timely
Elderly adults at
the risk of fall
Application of
exercise and
body balance
related
interventions or
exercise
standard
interventions
Effective and
improved results
related to
balance, and
stability
Within 3 months
The question: does the application of exercise and body balance related
intervention helps to improve the body balance and reinforce stability among the
elderly patients suffering from chronic diseases compared to standard interventions
within three months?
Search strategy
As per Colquhoun et al. (2014), search strategy is one of the critical aspect which is
used for the search and identification of accurate research articles so that with all the relevant
information found from the systematic search, effective results could be obtained. Further, it
was also mentioned that to find the accurate and relevant answer to the PICOT question of
the research, it is important to collect research findings from a wide array of appropriate
research articles. In this research paper, to understand the type of exercises that have been
used or could be used for the prevention of fall among elderly population. In this aspect, the

3HEALTH AND WELLBEING
databases such as CINAHL, and PubMed were used for the collection of latest research
articles of this particular or similar topic.
The time limit which was selected for the collection of research articles was 2012 to
2019 as selection of research articles within 10 years would help to identify relevant and
accurate research articles. Besides this, the keywords selected for this systematic search were
simple and accurately combined with the application of Boolean operators such as AND, OR
and NOT. Further as per Colquhoun et al. (2014), while selecting search strategy terms and
resources, it is important to review and refine results as well as select library resources so that
proximity searching could be utilised.
The keywords that were used for the search strategy were “fall prevention”, “elderly
patient”, “physiotherapeutic intervention”, “exercises”, “fall prevention and exercises”, fall
prevention and physiotherapy”, “fall prevention among elderly patients with exercise”. These
keywords were further connected through the Boolean operators so that refining the search
results could result in accurate finding. Further, in the search results obtained after several
hits in the selected databases, inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied in the found
research articles so that appropriate papers could be sieved through the search strategy and
then the finding of that paper could be critiqued and utilised for the development of the
research paper.
The inclusion criteria that was selected for this search strategy were related date of
publication (within 2012 to 2019), presence of English language, full text research articles
with adequate data collection and data interpretation, further, primary research articles with
accurate and identified research study were selected for this paper. Besides this, to exclude
the improper research articles exclusion criteria was applied that helped to remove descriptive