Balance impairment not predictive of falls in geriatric rehabilitation wards

Falls are common among hospital inpatients, particularly in rehabilitation wards. Standing balance impairment is widely held to be a contributing factor to falls, is a component of several falls risk screening tools, and has motivated the development of balance retraining programs for the reduction of in-hospital falls. Little rigorous investigation of the link between standing balance impairment and in-hospital falls has been undertaken.

We identified optimal cut-off points of four commonly used balance measures (functional reach, Timed Up and Go, step test, and timed static stance) in a prospective multicenter cohort study. Admission data (n = 1373) were clustered and matched by center then randomly allocated to development and validation data sets.

Optimal cut-off points for each test were identified from the development data set. The predictive accuracy of all four balance tests was poor when the optimal cut-off was applied to the validation data set (Youden Index scores ranged between 0.02 and 0.15).

These findings do not support an association between admission standing balance and falls in a geriatric rehabilitation setting. This result has implications for content of falls risk screening tools and interventions to prevent falls in a geriatric rehabilitation population.