Fall prevention lessons from Australian Coroner’s Court cases about older adults: harnessing the prophylactic power of medico-legal findings

Abstract

Despite our existing knowledge about fall prevention, older adults are still falling, and some die from those falls. Much of this knowledge comes from work done with live patients. Coroners (who investigate sudden and unexpected deaths) offer fresh insights into preventive lessons for minimising falls in older adults. Coroners have a legal public health function to reduce preventable deaths. Their court investigations draw from documents, such as witness statements, police records, healthcare records and expert witness statements. The lessons gleaned from the rich coronial data could be incorporated into updated versions of the World Fall Guidelines. Despite the preventive power of coronial data, it is an under-researched and under-used source of prophylactic insights for fall prevention. Numerous preventive lessons have emerged from our ongoing study of Australian coroners’ cases about fatal falls in older adults living in residential care. Specifically, these prophylactic learnings involve equipment, legal and policy changes and systems-level adaptations. While recognising the robustness of the World Falls Guideline, the coronial examples studied were not described in the working group specific to them and could add value to preventing falls in aged-care facilities. The global interest in the ageing population calls for serious consideration of additional ways to glean fall prevention insights. It is time to recognise and harness the preventive power of coronial data to benefit older adults and our communities.