Nursing Homes Study of Fall Risk Assessment Oriented to Intervention (EMERCOIR)

Fundacio Salut i Envelliment UAB

Status: Completed

Conditions: Quality of Life; Accidental Falls; Activities of Daily Living; Self-Efficacy

Treatments: Other: Fall risk assessment; Other: Tailored intervention

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT00888953

FICE09041

PI08/90162

645H

Details and patient eligibility

About

The aim of the study is to establish the impact of a falls screening questionnaire in the adoption of preventive interventions and eventually in the reduction of falls and its consequences in elder people living in nursing homes.

Full description

Falls are the most frequent accidents in nursing homes, affecting more than a third of residents each year. Up to 10% of fallers require hospitalization or suffer a fracture. Psychological consequences affects between 20 and 80% of fallers, which suffer a lack of self-confidence that leads to reduction of activities and an increase of the dependence in activities of daily living.

Not all the residents have the same risk, and each person can have more than one risk factor that can be identified (previous falls, self confidence, weakness, gait disorders, dizziness, cognitive impairment, etc).

Identification of risk factors is the first step to reduce falls, but is not enough by itself. For this reason, interventions directed towards the correction of identified risk factors are required. In this setting, multifactorial interventions are the most successful to reduce falls numbers and its consequences.

As individual randomization of residents presents important inconveniences (group contamination, control arm residents could felt discriminated), we will randomized nursing homes to each group.

Enrollment: 331 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 65+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• People with or without cognitive impairment living indefinitely in a nursing home place
• Able to walk with or without any kind of help or able to self transfer (as defined in category d420 of the WHO International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health) without help
• Give their consent (or the legal guardian in case of cognitive impairment).

Exclusion criteria

• Terminal illness (expected death before 6 months).
• Occupying temporarily a nursing home place (convalescence period) or another kind of place(day center, long term care, etc).

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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331 participants in 2 patient groups

Intervention

Experimental group

Description:

Residents living in nursing homes allocated to intervention group. Assessment of risk factors. Implementation of a multifactorial tailored program to prevent falls.

Treatment:

Other: Tailored intervention

Other: Fall risk assessment

Control

Other group

Description:

Residents living in nursing homes allocated to control group. Assessment of risk factors. Receive the usual attention.

Treatment:

Other: Fall risk assessment