Falls Risk Awareness Video Study

Every year one in three people aged 60 years and above fall over. More than 96.000 Australians are admitted to hospital each year due to a fall and this number is rising by 2% each year. People who have had a fall account for almost 40% of all hospitalised injury cases, with almost half of those falls resulting in injuries such as broken hips, neck- and head injuries. In 2015 almost 2300 Australians died as a direct result of a fall, a number which is more than three times higher than the number of people who die in car accidents.

Given the high risk of experiencing (an) (injurious) fall(s), various campaigns have been conducted with the aim of making older people aware that it is important to prevent falls. Also, numerous resources (websites, leaflets) are available to the general public that inform them of the several activities they can undertake to reduce their risk of falls. However, these campaigns and available resources do not seem to be compelling enough. Research has shown that people over the age of 60 still tend to underestimate their own risk of a fall, and have low levels of knowledge about how to prevent falls. Also, many older people report that they are not motivated to take action to reduce their risk of falls even thought they think that falls prevention would be useful for other older people. In particular older people state that they seek out information only after they fall and not before. It would be beneficial if the broad population and people over the age of 60 in particular, were more aware about falls and more motivated to take action(s) to reduce their risk of falling. Therefore the investigators aim to develop three short falls risk awareness videos that are appealing to people of all age groups and especially people aged 60 years and above.

Based on research findings by the investigators, to date three prototype versions of short falls risk awareness videos have been developed. During this research project these videos will be evaluated and then amended and developed further according to the feedback given by the participants. The feedback from participants will be sought in two phases.

Phase 1 In the first phase 50 community-dwelling older people over the age of 50 will be invited to share their thoughts and opinions about the prototype versions of the three falls risk awareness videos. For the participants in this phase of the study it will involve attending a focus group meeting of about 1½ hour in total together with 8-10 other participants. During this focus group meeting (but prior to the actual discussion about the videos) the researchers will also ask the participants to help test a questionnaire which is developed specifically for the purpose of this study. Participants will be asked to fill in the questionnaire twice (with a 20 minute rest in between). Questions pertain to the participants' knowledge of falls and their capabilities and motivation towards undertaking fall prevention activities. The researchers plan to use this questionnaire in the second phase of the project. It this phase it is solely used to measure the time taken to complete the questionnaire and to establish its reliability (and not to actually measure the outcomes at this point). Then the prototype videos will be shown twice, followed by a discussion group of around 45-50 minutes in which several questions will be asked about the content and the appeal of the three videos. Subsequent to the focus groups, the participants' feedback on the prototype videos will be evaluated and used to amend/develop the videos further.

Phase 2 During the second phase of this research study the amended videos will be screened to a larger audience of about 100 community-dwelling people aged 50 years and above during a World Café forum. This is a research design that specifically aims to gain consumers opinions about topics of interest. The aim of this forum is to seek these people's feedback on the three videos. In addition, the researchers will evaluate if having watched these three videos has changed the forum attendees' knowledge, intentions and some basic beliefs towards falls and engaging in falls prevention activities. This will be measured using the questionnaire that was pretested for reliability in the first phase of the study. The participants' feedback about the videos will be evaluated and used to develop the final versions of the videos. These final videos will be used in a future research study, most likely by being placed online and evaluated using the questionnaire previously developed.