There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Continence has been implicated as a contributing factor in falls related injury. In
aged care rehabilitation, continence was identified by podiatry as an issue in regards
to footwear selection and was an opportunity to improve falls prevention education
and improved quality of life for the patient. The key elements of this education focused
on the importance of slip-resistance in footwear and washability. Kingston Centre
is an aged care rehabilitation service that has an existing podiatry lead footwear
prescription service, where patients can purchase footwear with optimal features for
a reduced cost. Most of the footwear is machine-washable and several have an outsole
configuration that actively grips the floor in stance, which is advantageous on a
wet surface. An education package was developed for continence nurses to improve knowledge
of footwear, and foot care issues and promote referral to podiatry. Up-skilling continence
nurses in the importance of footwear selection, footwear laundering as well as general
foot care, has improved awareness of the relationship between appropriate footwear,
falls prevention and continence. Anecdotally, there has been a reduction in falls
in relation to continence issues. This will be further investigated in future. Of
particular note is that the delivery of educative in-services and the majority of
footwear prescription and fitting is performed by a skilled podiatry allied health
assistant. The podiatrist was in engaged in the development but has a now assumed
a smaller consultative role. Engaging a podiatry allied health assistant in this way
has expanded the service while still allowing the professional staff to focus high
risk patients. It also has improved quality of life implications for a population
that would not have been seen by podiatry.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited.
Conference name:
Australasian Podiatry Council Conference 2011