Bath falls common but often preventable among elderly

Getting in and out of the bath or shower can be a perilous journey for older adults, even when they have bathrooms already equipped with safety features, according to research by the University of Michigan Health System just published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Researchers videotaped people aged 60 and older who demonstrated (while fully clothed) how they normally climbed in and out of the shower or bath. One-third of the 89 participants in the study had difficulty, such as plopping onto a bath seat or hitting the side of the bath or the shower threshold with their legs.

The videotapes were also evaluated for the participants’ fluidity of movement and whether they had difficulty negotiating the environment.

While the majority of people using both baths and showers used safe environmental features such as grab bars, many used unsafe features such as the glass door, towel bar or a tub seat in addition to the safe ones.

Nineteen percent of participants using a bath were evaluated as using unsafe features, and more than 70% of those with showers used unsafe features. One participant had a plastic lawn chair as a bath seat, a particularly dangerous device given the curved shape of the bath floor.

Some safety problems researchers observed can be fixed easily such as the installation of a shower curtain in place of a door, and proper instruction about built-in bathroom safety features (such as grab bars designed for weight-bearing) for new residents of senior housing facilities.

A focus on better designs of bathrooms in senior housing facilities was also suggested by the researchers.