2023, Volume 19, Issue 1
Universal safe fall education – the missing pillar of prevention recommended by the WHO
Bartłomiej Gąsienica Walczak1, Jarosław Klimczak2
1Health Institute, University of Applied Sciences in Nowy Targ, Nowy Targ, Poland
2Department of Tourism and Recreation, University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Olsztyn, Poland
Author for correspondence: Bartłomiej Gąsienica Walczak; Health Institute, University of Applied Sciences in Nowy Targ, Nowy Targ, Poland; email: bartlomiej.gasienica@ppuz.edu.pl
Full text
Abstract
Background & Study Aim: The World Health Organization (WHO) publishes (2007) as part of the Global Fall Prevention Report for the Elderly, three pillars: first, to raise awareness of the importance of fall prevention; second, to improve the recognition and assessment of risk factors and determinants of falls; third, to develop and to implement realistic and effective interventions. The aim of this narrative review is to recommend universal safe fall education as the missing element of fall prevention system recommended by WHO.
Material & Methods: The narrative review is based on key WHO publications and the works of the ‘Polish School of Safe Falling’, which, in the authors' opinion, sufficiently demonstrate the global scale of this multi-threaded problem.
Results: Polish School of Safe Fall shifts the focus of preventing the inevitable consequences of falls to education that goes beyond the naive paradigm that falls can be eliminated (but they can be limited, admittedly) from human life – the annually 695 771 premature deaths and 19 252 699 people lived with a disability. This missing pillar was started in 1963 with a unique safe fall course for the blind. Currently, it is based on the theory of safe falls (1972) and on the methodology of teaching safe falls to healthy people and various high-risk groups (including amputees, blind, obese, with intellectual dysfunctions, etc.), also improved since 1972. A unique achievement are also methods of diagnosing and reducing susceptibility to the body injuries during a fall (including children 2 to 6 years of age).
Conclusions: The introduction of the ‘Polish School of Safe Falling’ recommendations (verified empirically many times) into global prevention of the effects of unintentional falls will protect the health of many millions of people around the world and will radically reduce the number of people who lose their lives in this seemingly trivial way. The high degree of generality of the argumentation of this narrative review (due to the extensiveness of the available empirical data) does not undermine the legitimacy of the above recommendations. Therefore, calling the fourth (missing) pillar ‘universal safe fall education’ would be neither a semantic abuse nor inconsistent with real evidence-based prevention.
Key words: cognitive impairment, epidemiology of falls, Polish School of Safe Falling
