It was Fall Prevention Awareness Week September 22-28,2013. D C activities were coordinated by the DC Falls Free Coalition, headed and organized very ably by Tori Goldhammer of Living at Home Consultations. I did a presentation to a real nice group of folks at the Hattie Holmes Senior Wellness Center. I pulled the presentation together from some things I have done before, as always, trying to update and improve the message.
I planned to write this blog with the title from my presentation: Falls Steal Dreams. Then I decided to check my previous writing about falls reduction (prevention is a mis-idea). Eureka! I found an earlier entry with that title. Is it more remarkable that my earlier entry is exactly what I planned to write this time?
This is a little disconcerting. I have not heard that we have started to solve the problem in any substantial way. This is not rocket science folks, but it sure is critical. And we aren’t really making headway. We need a new path, new ideas, new incentives, new motivations. We motivated the installation of solar collectors through tax breaks. We trained folks to weatherize older citizen homes. We need to use some of those techniques to reduce falls.(This is not my first time or am I the first to say this)
We need not just to make more people aware of fall reduction techniques BUT actually reduce falls. Your thoughts are welcome. In fact they are needed. Lets commit to some real change.
Louis Tenenbaum, one of the nation's leading authorities on aging in place, is the founder of HomesRenewed, a coalition of business, consumers and nonprofits, driving policy and investment to increase the number of age-friendly homes.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Last month I attended a workshop given by Teepa Snow, OTR/L, called Preventing Falls One Step at a Time. An interesting idea that came up was to teach people HOW to fall. We didn’t get into the details of that, but it seems like a new and potentially fruitful direction to follow.
I am the inventor of a product line called Grabcessories. You can see this Fall Prevention System on YouTube and at Grabcessories.com. Our missions is to prevent falls in and around every room in the home with Safe, Beautiful and functional products that compliment the home decor’ and “blend in”. Our products can also be found on HomeDepot.com, Walgreens.com, Amazon.com, Drugstore.com and others by typing Grabcessories in the search bar.