Class to avoid falling fills up fast

EAGLE STAFF

A program to help seniors avoid falling will return next fall.

The Staying on Your Feet program beginning this month at the Rosetown civic centre is full, Megan Sweet, who conducts the program, said last week.

“I had an amazing response,” Sweet said.

Besides scheduling the program again next September or October, the Outlook-based physiotherapist could conduct one during the summer, depending on interest and her schedule, she said.

During the federal government’s 2023-24 fiscal year, over 81,500 Canadians outside of Québec went to hospital because they’d fallen, a federal website said.

“In 2022, 7,189 older adults died due to a fall in Canada (excluding Yukon),” the webpage on falls said.

Developed by longtime Saskatoon physical therapist Sherri Wagenhoffer, the program involves a series of one-hour weekly sessions. Each session begins with a half hour of education on different topics. A half hour of exercise follows.

Topics in the education portion include fall risk factors and balance strategies, vision and how it can affect balance, keeping the brain healthy, the emotional impact of falls, bone health, environmental aids, making a safety plan and practising getting up and down off a floor.

“A pharmacist comes one week and talks about medications and how those can impact falls,” Sweet said.

A program that she conducted and that ended in November brought “a huge improvement” of 36 per cent “in people’s outcome measures,” she said. “We did a couple of tests at the start of the program and on the last day,” she explained.

Until she qualified to conduct the program, the program had only been available in Saskatoon, where Wagenhoffer developed it over many years, Sweet said.

Older adults spend 40 to 50 per cent longer in hospital after falls, compared to younger people, according to a Saskatchewan Health Authority document about the Staying on Your Feet program.

Falls represent “a major catalyst” in causing people to move to long-term care homes, the document says. People should move more carefully to “compensate for some of the physical changes that happen with aging,” it adds.