Falls among seniors is among the major concerns for people with dementia and their family members. As per NFSI, falls causes 87% fractures among elders over the age 65 and are the second leading reason causing spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, and injury-related deaths. You see, the numbers are staggering!

Most falls happen when the person is moving from a bed or chair without someone’s assistance. One way to reduce this possibility is to install bed alarms for dementia patients. However, that won’t be enough alone.

Here are some other things that can eliminate dementia-related falls:

Adequate lighting

Dementia patients tend to lose their visual abilities and are prone to illusions. The best way to reduce misperceptions and other visual difficulties among them is to ensure all the corners of the house are equipped with lights.

Adequate lighting will help them avoid confusions and illusions while moving around. You should remember that they can easily misinterpret darkness, or even a shadow. So, make sure that there is no dark area left in the house.

Decreasing clutter

Seniors can have problems with clutters, inside and outside their homes. They need a free path to walk at and there should be no irregularity, objects, or other such hurdles present. Having lots of items will only increase their possibility of falling.

These are a few factors that result in fall in most cases and removing them from your place is the only way to ensure safety for your loved ones suffering dementia.

Providing cues

The biggest issue with dementia patients is to interpret visual things correctly. They face problems in separating different objects of same color. For instance, carpets and doormats in same colors can make them miss the doorstep and cause falls.

So, using contrast colors that work as visual cues is a great idea. Make sure to keep objects and their backgrounds in contrast and you’re good to go.

Notes and reminders

You know they tend to forget. So, providing them with enough notes and reminders with schedules and locations of daily-use stuff can be a brilliant idea. Decide a single place that is easily accessible for them and place all those notes and reminders there so they know what and when to do. You can try doing this with a dry board.

This will help them get all the information at one place, reducing the need to move around and ask different people about things that they are supposed to do daily, such as taking medicines or finding other daily-use items.

In a nutshell

Making arrangements for fall prevention might have been on the top of your list for a while. It is time to take necessary steps and ensure safety for seniors at home. The above tips will help you with that. You can also invest in comfortable clothing and footwear for them to further reduce such possibilities.

In case you’re looking for bed alarms for fall prevention, feel free to reach out to us or explore our collection on our website.