A new report reveals that falls among older people cost the UK government almost one billion pounds a year.
A fall can be a very significant event for an elderly person - often requiring medical care and maybe even marking the end of independent living. For many, death follows in the short to medium term. Researchers at the York Health Economics Consortium in the UK have been looking into the costs of falls among the elderly. In particular, they examined the number of visits to emergency medicine departments, hospital admissions and associated costs.

In 1999, the year for which this study was carried out, there were around 650,000 emergency visits and over 204,000 hospital admissions associated with falls among people aged 60 or over. The cost of all this was about 981 million pounds a year - around 60 per cent of which was paid by the health service.

Half of these costs were from hospital admission which was far more likely among the very elderly. Long term care accounted for another 41 per cent of the bill. Add to this out of pocket expenses borne by the individual and their family and economic consequences of reduced quality of life after a fall.

The cost of falls is a substantial part of the health service budget - about a fifth of the national drugs bill, for instance. It's vital, therefore, that more is done to prevent falls - both for the sake of the individual and to reduce the costs to the health service. A good start would be to find out more about what influences the number and severity of falls among the elderly.