Establishing a Falls Clinic
Falls Clinic
BENEFITS
- Specialist opinion for patients
- Early, accurate, and efficient diagnosis
- Timely treatment
- Better application of recommended guidelines
- Less duplication and fragmentation of services
- Single source of communication for all stakeholders
- Reduction of total care costs
- Better systems for monitoring and evaluating practice at local, national, and international levels
- High-quality, evidence-based data for research
- Evidence-based innovation in diagnosis, treatments, and healthcare model
BARRIERS
- Underestimation of consequences of falls
- Access for older adults in rural settings
- Lack of awareness of benefit of a falls clinic on quality-of-life
- Low numbers of providers specialized in assessing patients with falls
- Lack of formal fall risk programs
- Wide age range of patients and comorbidities
- Skill sets required in many domains (eg, geriatrics, cardiology, neurology, psychiatry, orthopedics, pharmacology)
- Falls is not a recognized subspecialty
- Reluctance to introduce innovative proposals
- Necessity to engage multiple stakeholders
- Inadequate reimbursement of fall assessment and management
- Fear of increasing costs by developing a new structure (instead of reducing costs)