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