
Four of every 10 American seniors who suffer a fall and end up in the ER with head trauma get no follow-up care once they go home, a new study finds. “Only 59 percent of our study subjects had follow-up with their [health care] provider,” study senior author Dr. Richard Shih said. He’s professor of emergency medicine at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Even if patients do manage to see a doctor after their ER discharge, they often get no guidance on how to prevent another fall, Shih and his colleagues said. “Of the patients in our study that had primary care physician follow-up, 28 percent reported that there was no fall-risk assessment and 44 percent did not receive fall prevention interventions,” he said in a university news release. Falls can be highly injurious and often fatal for older Americans. According to data supplied by the university, in a given year 1 in every 4 Americans aged 65 or older will suffer a fall, resulting in 8 million emergency department visits annually, 800,000 hospitalizations and more than 27,000 deaths. Seeing your family doctor after you’ve recovered from a serious fall is crucial to helping prevent subsequent falls, the Florida team said. Unfortunately, that kind of follow-up often doesn’t happen. In their study, Shih’s team tracked levels of follow-up care for more than 1,500 seniors… read on > read on >