Eye care practitioners and falls prevention for older adults: A scoping review

TL;DR

This review finds that eye care practitioners have limited awareness and implementation of falls prevention strategies for older adults, highlighting a need for better training and practice integration.

Contribution

The study maps the current evidence on eye care practitioners' role in falls prevention and identifies gaps in awareness and implementation.

Findings

Eye care practitioners have low awareness of falls prevention guidelines.

Practitioners are not routinely assessing visual factors linked to falls risk.

There is a gap between falls prevention evidence and its implementation in eye care practice.

Abstract

Eye care practitioners are well‐placed in the community to provide falls prevention advice to older adults, but existing literature offers scant insight into whether this occurs in practice. This scoping review aimed to map and synthesize the evidence for community eye care practitioners' awareness and behaviors in falls prevention in older adults, as well as barriers and enablers to implementation of falls evidence.

This review process was guided by the Arksey and O'Malley framework for scoping reviews and PRISMA‐ScR guidelines. MEDLINE, CINAHL Complete, Embase, Web of Science and OpenMD were searched for published and gray literature between January 1990 to October 2024. Data were mapped against the World Falls Guidelines framework of: (i) risk stratification, (ii) assessment, and (iii) management, and a barriers and enablers framework.

A total of 19 sources met the inclusion criteria. Few studies directly captured results from eye care practitioners. The results suggested a gap in implementation of falls guideline evidence. Community eye care practitioners had low levels of awareness about falls, and were not routinely implementing falls history taking, risk stratification and assessment of contrast, visual fields, and stereopsis. Eye care practitioners might not be referring patients for exercise and environmental interventions.

The evidence suggests that eye care practitioners have some awareness of falls prevention, but might benefit from better understanding of evidence‐based falls guidelines. There appeared to be gaps that exist between evidence and translation into practice. Future studies should explore practitioner experiences and implementation efforts to improve falls prevention in community eye care. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2025; 25: 337–345.

A scoping review was carried out to map the evidence for eye care practitioners' awareness and behaviors in falls prevention for older adults. Results showed that eye care practitioners have some awareness of falls, but might benefit from better understanding and implementation of evidence‐based falls guidelines.

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