Compliant sports floors and fall-related injuries: evidence from a residential care setting and updated meta-analysis for all patient care settings

Johanna Gustavsson, Finn Nilson, Carl Bonander
2022
Compliant flooring may prevent fall injuries in residential care, but evidence is inconclusive. We investigate compliant sports floors and fall-related injuries in a residential care setting and update a meta-analysis from a recent systematic review on compliant flooring. A non-randomised study comparing outcomes in a residential care unit that installed sports flooring in bedrooms with four units with regular flooring in a Norwegian municipality (n=193). Data on falls were collected for a
more » ... d of 46 months (323 falls on sports flooring; 414 on regular flooring). Outcomes were injurious falls per person bed-day, falls per person bed-day and injury risks per fall. Confounding was adjusted for using Andersen-Gill proportional hazards and log-binomial regression models. Random-effects inverse variance models were used to pool estimates. Injurious fall rates were 13% lower in the unit with sports flooring (adjusted HR (aHR): 0.87 (95% CI: 0.55 to 1.37)). There was limited evidence of adverse effects on fall rates (aHR: 0.93 (95% CI: 0.63 to 1.38)) and the injury risk per fall was lower in fall events that occurred on sports floors (adjusted relative risk (RR): 0.75 (95% CI: 0.53 to 1.08)). Pooling these estimates with previous research added precision, but the overall pattern was the same (pooled RR for injurious falls: 0.66 (95% CI: 0.39 to 1.12); fall rates: 0.87 (95% CI: 0.68 to 1.12); injury risks per fall: 0.71 (95% CI: 0.52 to 0.97)). Sports floors may be an alternative to novel shock-absorbing floors in care settings; however, more research is needed to improve precision.
doi:10.1136/ip-2022-044713 pmid:36564164 pmcid:PMC10423535 fatcat:jxqaq6f7q5ekbc7pgumc6cb3j4