| Sumario: | Falls are the most common cause of injuries among the elderly in and outside of health institutions. Falls can have many negative consequences for the elderly. Between 10 and 20% of falls in nursing homes cause serious injuries. Effect of various interventions to prevent falls in institutions:1. Multifactorial interventions (interventions that consists of a number of various components like education of staff and offers of exercises to the patients) adapted to the institutions conditions probably reduce rate of fall in hospitals (e.g. number of falls in a person year, this captures that some persons fall multiple times).2. Multifactorial interventions compared to usual practice do possibly not influence the rate of falls, the number of fallers (persons who fall at least once) or hip fractures in care facilities.3. Vitamin D supplementation to patients with low levels of vitamin D in care facilities will probably reduce the rate of falls, but not the number of fallers.4. Use of risk assessment tools compared to nurses' judgment in care facilities probably result in small differences on the rate of falls or the number of fallers.5. The diagnostic accuracy of the STRATIFY rule is limited and should not be used in isolation for identifying individuals at high risk of falls in clinical practice. For several of other studied interventions there are large uncertainty about the results. We are uncertain if these interventions have an effect or not. We cannot conclude if the following interventions affect the rate of falls or the number of fallers; exercise, medication review, encourage adoption of best practice strategies, very low bed, fall prevention tool kit software, use of educational materials.
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