14 Ways To Stay Safe and Prevent Falls

Accident/Fall Prevention
Creating an environment for prevention of accidents and falls should be very important to you when having an older person in the home.  Here are a few tips that aid you in making your home safe.

1.Have a nightlight in the bedroom, hallway and bathroom.  It might not be a bad idea to have one in the kitchen as well.  This keeps your loved ones from stumbling around in dark when getting out of bed for a drink of water of going to the bathroom.

2.It’s best not to have throw rugs on the floor.  Rugs will curl and cause someone to trip over the edge and fall.

3.Make sure when you mop the floor that, it is completely dried before anyone is allowed to walk on it.  Wet floors are very dangerous.

4.Never plug up and item and leave the cord strung across the floor.  Anyone can get their toes caught on the cord and down they will go.

5.If you have carpet covered stairs in your house, you need to make sure the carpet has no frayed areas.  The best thing to do is to put a runner on the stair and make sure you tack it down on each stair so it won’t move.

6.It there are broken stairs in your home, make sure they are repaired or replaced.

7.Always keep charged flashlights in each room in case the power goes out.

8.Clutter can be a biggie.  Having shoes, book, toys, or clothes around can cause major falls.  Everything should be put away.

9.When there is a spill on the floor, make sure it gets cleaned up immediately.  If forgotten, sometimes spills can’t be easily seen and will cause your feet to slip.

10.Use non-skid bathtub/shower mat in your bathrooms.  You might want to consider a shower chair for ease.

11.Absolutely avoid using the sink to pull yourself up off the toilet.  There are raised seats that you can install very easily.

12.Install wall grab bars in the shower, on walls around the tub and around your toilet.

13.Avoid having furniture or chairs that is hard to get up out of.You can purchase lift chairs that make falls almost impossible when getting up from a sitting position.

14.It is nice to have a phone in every room and that is easily accessible in case you need to make a call to 911.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 11:49 am and is filed under Fall Prevention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.