Evaluating audio-visual falls prevention messages with community-dwelling older people using a World Café forum approach

Abstract

BackgroundFalls risk increases sharply with older age but many older people are unaware or underestimate their risk of falling. Increased population-based efforts to influence older people’s falls prevention behavior are urgently needed. The aim of this study was to obtain a group of older people’s collective perspectives on newly developed prototypes of audio-visual (AV) falls prevention messages, and evaluate changes in their falls prevention behaviour after watching and discussing these.MethodsA mixed-method study using a community World Café forum approach.ResultsAlthough the forum participants (n = 38) mostly responded positively to the three AV messages and showed a significant increase in their falls prevention capability and motivation after the forum, the participants collectively felt the AV messages needed a more inspirational call to action. The forum suggested this could be achieved by means of targeting the message and increasing the personal connection. Participants further suggested several alternatives to online falls prevention information, such as printed information in places in the community, as a means to increase opportunity to seek out falls prevention information.ConclusionsFalls prevention promotion messages need to be carefully tailored if they are to be more motivating to older people to take action to do something about their falls risk. A wider variety of revised and tailored AV messages, as one component of a community-wide falls prevention campaign, could be considered in an effort to persuade older people to take decisive action to do something about their falls risk.Trial registrationThis study was registered prospectively: NCT03154788. Registered 11 May 2017.

Diseño de la guía GAS-VI para la evaluación del apoyo a la vida independiente de personas con discapacidad intelectual | Design of the guide GAS-VI for the assessment of the support to independent living of people with intellectual disabilities

“…El método del World Café ha sido utilizado en el ámbito de la salud para implicar a pacientes y comunidad en la priorización de los temas de investigación (MacFarlane et al, 2017), recoger los puntos de vista de personas mayores sobre campañas de prevención de caídas (de Jong et al, 2019), analizar los apoyos, las barreras y oportunidades de los servicios destinados a madres adolescentes (Johnson et al, 2018), analizar con miembros de asociaciones de enfermos crónicos un cambio en el planteamiento de la intervención en el ámbito de la salud (Biondo et al, 2019) o analizar la incidencia de la investigación acción en la práctica docente de la formación en enfermería (van Wyngaarden et al, 2018), entre otros.…”

An Integrated mHealth Campaign to Reduce the Risk of Falling for Older Adults

“…In addition, tailored messages have been proven relevant to motivate older people to address their falls risk. Recent studies have tested new ways to communicate these tailored messages, such as audio-visual messages as part of community falls prevention campaigns (de Jong et al, 2019).…”

Health beliefs and adherence of the elderly to fall prevention measures: a quasi-experimental study

“…Interventions focused on gradual changes, flexible and simple to be applied in daily life tend to enable greater adherence, since the lower the complexity, the greater the adherence to the recommendations (51) . Also, a previous study showed that a fall prevention program developed with handson activities in educational meetings makes more sense to the elderly and favors their adherence behavior (14) .…”

“…Given the magnitude of the problem of falls, there is a recommendation that more interventions be conducted to improve the adherence behavior of the elderly to the PMs (14)(15)(16) and decrease the influence of risk factors, such as beliefs (5,17) . Studies have shown that educational interventions can be effective in modifying health beliefs and behaviors (18)(19)(20)(21) .…”

“…In these interventions, health education is a low-cost technique that brings positive results for people's health (22) . Furthermore, it is an opportunity to re-educate the elderly about fall prevention behaviors, allowing them to improve their adherence to the PMs (14,23) .…”