Project 460721

Older adults have an alarmingly high risk for falling and suffering injures, making falls a critical public health issue. The ground-breaking American Geriatrics and British Geriatrics Societies guidelines were published in 2001, almost two decades ago. Since then, new scientific discoveries have been made for how to determine who is at risk and how to prevent falls, but the guidelines have not been updated. Furthermore, each country has been publishing their own guidelines and clinicians are unaware of which ones are the best. For example, scientists now know of factors that influence fall risk, such as low cognition, and of new technology that can help us measure who is most at risk, such as smart sensors that you can wear. Importantly, patients and caregivers perspective was missed in previous guidelines Our goal is to create new guidelines for fall prevention based on evidence collected from experts around the globe. These "world falls guidelines" will be crucial for doctors, nurses, scientists, and patients alike in determining the risk of falls, and the different strategies available to prevent them. Our group has made significant progress in reaching this goal. We have ensembled 11 working groups of experts who have generated a list of recommendations, which will be open to the feedback of people who have lived experiences with falls, as well as experts across the world in falls prevention and medicine. Our current effort, which includes a full workshop and voting process among world experts and patient stakeholders, will be essential, as it will allow us to obtain critical feedback from community members and patients so that by the end of the meeting we will have refined the recommendations that we have been working on thus far as part of the world falls guidelines initiative. These guidelines will be disseminated to patients, scientists, doctors, nurses, and policymakers to help prevent falls.