Falls send more of us to hospital, new report shows

TORONTO — A raised bit of concrete on a sidewalk. An icy patch on the road. A misstep on the stairs at home. All of these can lead to accidental falls — landing a person not only on the ground, but often also in hospital.

Unintentional falls are the most common form of injury across the country: every day last year, falls resulted in almost 1,800 reported emergency department visits and 417 hospital admissions, says a new report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).

In 2016-17, nearly 654,000 — or about one-third — of the more than two million injury-related emergency department visits were due to accidental falls, CIHI reported. Injuries from falls led to about 152,500 hospital admissions, up from more than 146,600 the previous year.

The average length of a hospital stay after a fall was 14.3 days, compared to 7.5 days for other medical reasons, the data showed.

Falls are the scourge of growing older, said Geoff Fernie, a senior researcher at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute who is independent of CIHI. He notes that seniors have a higher risk of taking a fall and tend to have more serious injuries as a result.

“But it’s not exclusively older people,” he said. “We see a lot of young children falling down stairs and having serious head injuries.

“We see middle-aged people running up and down stairs and having indoor stair accidents quite commonly. And we see a lot of workers having falls — and not just construction-type workers. People in the winter, falling over in the car park when they get there in the morning.”

In fact, almost 8,800 of fall-related injuries across Canada occurred as a result of people slipping on ice, CIHI data showed.