For this reason, it is necessary for health care providers to carefully detect the causes of falls in order to prevent and minimize the risks of falls.
Based on the report of the National Health Statistics in England and Wales, the total number of fall and fracture during the year 2004 is 4,547. (National Statistics, 2006) Roughly 64.1% of the cases is unintentional, 32.5% is caused by osteoporosis. The remaining 2.2% and 1.2% is caused by suicide and undetermined probable homicide respectively. (See Table I in appendix– Incidence of Falls and Fractures in England and Wales on page 15)
As I work in an elderly rehabilitation ward this topic is more relevant to my clinical area because elderly individuals are more prone to experience fall-related injuries. Seventy percent of accidental death among the elderly patients is due to fall. Most of the elderly individuals that suffer from hip fracture due to serious falls are not able to regain their normal level of function. (Stevens and Olson, 2000) The fact that this type of accidents could lead to the serious physical injury and death among the elderly individuals (Lipsitz, 1991), the causes of falls should be taken seriously in order to prevent and minimize the incidence of falls among the elderly individuals. Therefore, it is necessary to rehabilitate physical injuries due to fall (Muche and McCarty, 2006).
In gathering concrete evidences regarding the causes of falls among the elderly patients, the author uses the search engines particularly ‘yahoo’ and ‘google’. Both search engines has been very helpful in enabling the researcher to locate relevant evidenced-based journal that comes from databases search such as dialog datastar: Medline, Embase, Pubmed, The Cochrane Library, Sumsearch, and Trip database.