Effectiveness of A Community Health Promotion Program on Fall Prevention

• Main Authors: Chung-huo, Huang, 黃椿藿
• Other Authors: Chuan-hsiu, Tsai
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/95949976878087668595

碩士 === 慈濟大學 === 護理學系碩士班 === 103 === Aim: The purpose of this research is to evaluate the efficacy of community health promotion program for community elders on fall prevention. Background: Fall prevention in the elderly is one of the most important public health issues worldwide. Fall experience not only lead to physical and mental problems, also may increase care burden of their family members. Poor balance may decrease physical activity and low bone density increase fracture risk, which are aggravating the damage of fall to the elderly. However, current fall prevention programs are designed mostly focused on muscle training and environmental modification. The programs focused on bone’s health and safety environment for the community elderly were limited. Therefore, this study was designed to provide community elderly fall related training as well as bone's health knowledge in order to prevent further fall and fall-related injury. Methods: A single group pre-/post-test quasi-experimental design was used. Community elders over 65 year old were recruited to participate in an weekly community health promotion program on fall prevention for 8 weeks, the program includes 20-30 minutes education and 20-30 minutes of exercise training. A total of 171 Hualien community elders participated in the study, and 110 subject completed the fall prevention program Structured questionnaire including demographic, healthy behavior survey, indicator of need for support, risk of indicator, risk of fall questionnaire were used to measure the efficacy of the program. Results: After 8 weeks of training, fall rate dropped 39.1 % to 30.9 %. The elderly in the community fall risk and bone health awareness is a significant difference (p = 0.000). And by post hoc comparisons, the fall-risk projects, pre-test scores (2.24±1.33) were greater than scores of one year track (2.51±1.11)and post-test scores(1.63±1.09). About the bone’s health knowledge questionnaires, the post-test scores (75.46±16.01) was greater than the pre-test scores (41.64±16.13). The fall rates during one year follow up failed to demonstrated a statistically significant difference (p= 0.182). Conclusions and Recommendations: The results of the study reported the elderly community health promotion can be (1) to improve bone’s health knowledge, (2) to reduce the risk of falls, and (3) mitigate rising fall risk. Based on the results of this study, the following suggestion were made: (1) the systematic use of community health needs assessment tool for the elderly, using rapid survey of their health needs. (2) Short-term fall prevention programs can be effective in reducing the rate of fall. (3) The future fall prevention interventions should be targeted not only the elderly community, the proposed intervention can be extended objects, such as other providers of caregivers.