Aged Care Insite Issue 106 | Apr-May 2018 | Page 25

practical living house work, so it’s usually the heavier duties such as vacuuming, doing the bathroom, stuff like that. They may be getting transport assistance. It all depends on what services they’re getting. So what we’ve done is the fall prevention program’s not specific to the clients, but we’ve trained up the community care workers, and it’s almost like a value add to their service, but we firstly needed to see whether it was feasible for them to be able to deliver it safely. You said most of the surveyed clients enjoyed the exercises they were given and felt the program made a positive change in their lives. What else did older adults have to say about the program? The people who were involved were really positive about it, which was fantastic. They enjoyed doing the different exercises, and we try to incorporate the exercises into their daily living so it’s not an expectation of doing them 10 times in one go and doing it twice a day. That’s not the type of exercise we do. It’s more trying to get them to incorporate it into their daily life. If they’re going out and doing the washing, we want them to bend from the knees rather than bending from the waste, so then they’re doing a squat and they’re working their quads and their gluteal muscles rather than just extending their hamstrings, which doesn’t help with their strength so much. So it was more about really getting them to create these exercises as part of their daily living and that way they’ll carry it on. What does the training behind the program involve? The training was a half day, so it took four hours, and we went through things such as safety, different risks involved with falls and the different interventions that can help falls prevention. Then we went through the actual assessment tools to make sure the clients were able to do it. If their care worker was unsure, then we got them to go off to the GP and got the okay that the client could be part of the exercise program, and then we went through all of the exercises really carefully with them so that they could understand firstly how to do it themselves and then how to train the client to be able to do them safely too. What do you hope people will take away from the findings of this research? Firstly, that non-allied health people can deliver this exercise program safely – that’s really important to find out first – and to have an understanding whether they could do it within their service provision, which we did find out. Now the next step is to do a larger study to look at whether we reduce the rate of falls for community care clients. This is really important because at the moment they fall 50 per cent more often than people the same age who aren’t receiving services.  ■ 2018 AMH Aged Care Companion Coming Soon The AMH Aged Care Companion is a practical reference for health professionals working with older people. It contains the latest evidence-based information on the management of over 70 conditions common in older people, along with general principles of medicines use in this population, including deprescribing. It also includes non-drug treatment advice. The 2018 Online release is 4th April 2018. The 2018 Book release is 30th April 2018. Go to www.amh.net.au for more information. agedcareinsite.com.au 23