摘要：Preventing injuries in older populations (aged 50–86 years) is more complex than in younger populations because of frailty, comorbidities, polypharmacy, and physical and cognitive functional limitations. To improve accessibility and delivery of comprehensive, focused injury prevention, we developed a model incorporating applicable features of our national children’s program with additional elements to address challenges of older populations. The older adult injury prevention model addresses gaps in prevention by improving access to risk factor screening, safety devices, education, counseling, medical care, and referrals. Comprehensive children’s injury prevention programs are widely available but do not address the complexities of comorbid illnesses, physical and cognitive functioning, frailty, and polypharmacy that complicate older adult injury prevention programs. 1 – 4 Existing older adult programs are frequently single injury mechanism programs. Although falls are the prevalent mode of injury, nonfall mechanisms contribute disproportionately to the older adult injury burden in minority communities. 5 , 6 Although this suggests that comprehensive rather than single mechanism injury programs may be more appropriate, such models are not available and few reports have been published on injury risk factors for older adults residing in minority communities—both of which hamper prevention efforts. Our children’s injury prevention program, based on a model with coalition involvement in reengineering of physical and social environments, contained useful features for adult and older adult injury prevention 1 but did not include comprehensive risk factor identification or an injury prevention delivery mechanism suitable for addressing issues of older adult populations. A familiar and accepted delivery mechanism—the health fair—had been used successfully to increase access to a variety of preventive screenings in older populations 7 , 8 but had not evolved sufficiently to support a focused, comprehensive prevention and intervention approach to a single, but highly complex, issue.
