Project Overview
This study will evaluate the effectiveness of home adaptations, both in preventing hospital admissions due to falls for older people, and improving timely discharge.
Our results will provide evidence for services in health and social care, informing policies seeking to promote healthy ageing through prudent healthcare and fall prevention.
Everyone living in Wales, UK, aged 60 and over, will be included in the study using anonymised linked data from the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank.
We will use a national database of home modifications implemented by the charity organisation Care & Repair Cymru (C&R) from 2009 to 2017 to define an intervention cohort. We will use the electronic Frailty Index to assign individual levels of frailty (fit, mild, moderate or severe) and use these to create a comparator group (non-C&R) of people who have not received a C&R intervention.
Co-primary outcomes will be quarterly numbers of emergency hospital admissions attributed to falls at home, and the associated length of stay. Secondary outcomes include the time in moving to a care home following a fall, and the indicative financial costs of care for people who had a fall.
