The Measurement and Reporting of Falls: Recommendations for Research and Practice on Defining Faller Types.

The purpose of this editorial is to provide a necessary and timely update to the guidelines on the measurement of falls for researchers and healthcare providers.A falls prevention working group convened in 2005 and detailed recommendations for falls definitions and falls outcome standardization for those living in the community 1 (Table 1).Since 2005, there has been an increase in research uptake on fall prevention, given the world's aging population and falls being recognized as a global healthcare priority 2 .There are now recommendations within the World Falls Guidelines to guide clinicians in evidence-based falls prevention interventions 3 .The World Falls Guidelines support harmonisation of definitions for falls and recurrent falls and give definitions of unexplained falls and falls with injury for clinicians and clinical data gathering (Table 1).However, additional research indicates that different risk profiles are evident within faller types 4,5 , that documenting near falls may be useful for informing interventions 6,7 , and that applying a universal injury scale 8 would afford consistency in reporting within research.A lack of standardization of the measurement of falls and types of fallers across research studies and settings continues to be a major barrier to advancements in knowledge 5 .The 2005 consensus recommended that falls data be summarized by the number of non-fallers, fallers, and recurrent fallers 1 .Interestingly, the consensus mentioned that fall injuries should be documented, but did not mention whether injurious fallers should be separately classified.Furthermore, the consensus did not comment on single fallers or near fallers.A unified implementation of faller type definitions, irrespective of setting, along with the rationale would improve standardization and comparison across studies.We recommend that researchers document non-fallers, fallers, single fallers, recurrent fallers, injurious fallers, and near fallers given that they each exhibit distinct differences in their fall-risk profile (Table 2).Interventions to support different faller types could be better targeted.