Summary
Unpacking the Bay Alarm Medical infographic on the consequences for a senior taking a fall. Answering question such as: how bad can it get for a senior to fall? What happens to life expectancy after a fall? And what happens to the quality of life after a fall?
Taking a fall is never fun, at any age, but as we get older, the damage gets bigger. How bad can it get for a senior to fall? What happens to life expectancy after a fall? And what happens to the quality of life after a fall?
At Bay Alarm Medical, we took all the answers and statistics for these questions and combined them all into an easy-to-read infographic to use as a reference for the risks and costs of senior fall injuries. Let’s go through it here and make sure we understand the risks for a senior experiencing a fall.
Here’s the beginning of the infographic:
The Golden Hour After a Fall
Let’s cut straight to the Golden Hour, which is the first hour after an elderly person has a fall. If that person can get help within the first hour, the outcome for living a healthy life is vastly improved, over the outcome for someone who has to lie on the floor helpless for some time before being found or being able to summon help.
And the bottom line with the Golden Hour is that medical alert systems have ensured that 97% of people receive help within that first hour. And where help is on hand in the same building – with a caregiver in-home, or in an assisted living facility, for example – a senior who falls doesn’t stay down for longer than 5 minutes! Getting help fast is the number one goal after a fall – our health, life expectancy and quality of life all depend on this one factor.
As countless testimonials all show by now, medical alert systems save lives. And as the infographic shows, they also help preserve the quality of life after the fall.
What Do the Numbers Say?
Our infographic shows that 1 in 3 adults aged 65 and older fall each year – that’s high odds of it happening to someone close to you. Falls are one of the most serious accidents among people over 65 – in fact, they’re the leading cause of injury-death, traumatic brain injuries and hospital trauma admissions, as well as a host of non-fatal injuries.
As many as 3 out of 10 seniors who fall suffer lacerations, hip fractures or head traumas – and astonishingly, only half of these people will mention it to their doctor. People are perhaps sensitive about revealing their loss of balance or sudden weakness, but medical examination is highly recommended after a fall – you never know what damage may have occurred.
Picture a fall happening and it’s plain to see where the vulnerable places on the body at risk of a fracture are: they include fractures to the arms and legs, ankles and hands, and of course the hip and spine are prone to fracture, as well as the pelvis. These are the most common fractures that occur, and there’s nothing in that list that’s trivial, at any age, but especially in an aging body. So a fall can have serious consequences.
What Does the Clock Say?
When someone has a fall, the clock starts running, and consequences get worse the longer that someone goes without help. We’ve mentioned the Golden Hour, and it all goes downhill from there.
As the infographic shows, after 3 hours without help, medical conditions may worsen simply from being unattended – hospitalization is almost always required, and for people over ninety, the situation can be dire. At 4 to 5 hours without help, hospitalization is certain, for as long as two weeks or more, and pre-existing ailments may have begun to react by now.
It’s a grim picture to imagine, but for an elder who has fallen and can’t get up, and who still has no help after 6-11 hours, the hospital must be the first stop, and 90% of people who suffer for this length of time will have to live in a nursing home thereafter. Longer time periods, 18-23 hours, increase the length of hospital time and the chance of permanent damage is high, meaning a recovery to the state of health prior to the fall is pretty much not on the cards.
It gets worse the longer a fall victim is down, of course, and after 24 hours or longer, the length of time spent immobile on the floor becomes a medical attack in its own right, deteriorating the body as it lies prone. And the odds of actually dying become much higher now.
What Does Your Wallet Say?
There’s nothing good about falling and for seniors it can be a ruinous experience. Life expectancy and the quality of life (sometimes combined by demographics experts into one measure, called “healthy life expectancy”), are frequently impacted, for the worse. And of course, beyond the health aspect, then there’s the cost.
One staggering number in recent years shows that the calculated costs of falls in the U.S. may exceed $50 Billion per year. Our infographic breaks it down into the types of costs incurred from a serious fall – not only the thousands of dollars in medical treatment and rehabilitation, but also the indirect costs of a reduced capacity to live a vibrant life.
The infographic is a stark reminder that every fall has potentially disastrous consequences, and it’s important that anyone who is aging or dealing with an aging person do everything possible to minimize the risk of a fall.
Risk is made up of two factors: the likelihood of an event occurring, weighed against the potential damage if such an event were to occur. We may feel, for example, that a certain event is unlikely, but in that small chance that it does occur, how catastrophic would the impact be?
We can all fall, at any age, and we can all have accidents that are unforeseen. And falls are by no means rare. The numbers show that falls are a threat that we have to guard against, increasingly as the body ages. The infographic may help you understand and explain the dangers to a loved one, or to yourself, and we hope that it will do some good.
