Falls Prevention Week runs from 21 to 25 September. Across the UK, NHS trusts, councils and Age UK branches will spend it saying the same thing: falling is not an inevitable part of getting older.
We agree. We've supplied resistance bands to NHS physiotherapy departments and community programmes for years, and we've seen what changes when people build strength. So this week we're doing five posts, one a day, on what actually works. Today: the numbers.
What falls cost
One in three people over 65 falls at least once a year. Over 80, it's one in two. That's not a small minority; it's most of us, eventually, unless something changes.
Last year 71,885 people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland broke a hip. Around 90% of hip fractures are the result of a fall. At any moment roughly one in every 30 hospital beds is occupied by someone recovering from one. Falls-related hip fractures alone cost the NHS and social care more than £2.3 billion a year.
Behind the fractures sit the ambulances. Falls are the single most common reason for an ambulance to be sent to an older person: North West Ambulance Service alone attended more than 90,000 falls in 2024, and took 63% of those people to hospital. Across England there are around 235,000 emergency hospital admissions for falls in over-65s every year, two-thirds of them people over 80. Add fragility fractures of the wrist, spine and pelvis and the bill to the UK reaches £4.4 billion a year.
And falls kill. They accounted for almost half of the 23,000 accidental deaths in the UK in 2023 — roughly 11,000 people, more than road traffic collisions. Of those who break a hip, around one in five moves into long-term care within a year.
But the number we think about most isn't a cost. In a large European study, 54% of people over 70 said they were afraid of falling, and 38% said they had stopped doing things because of it. That's the quiet damage: the walk not taken, the garden left, the stairs avoided. Less activity means less strength, which means more risk. The fear becomes the cause.
What the system is doing about it
Not enough, yet. The National Audit Office reported in December 2025 that only 18% of people living with severe frailty had a falls-risk assessment in the past year, and 70% of Integrated Care Boards missed the NICE standard. For the 72,000 people who did break a hip, 79% waited more than a week for community rehabilitation to begin; the guidance says 72 hours.
None of this is a criticism of the clinicians involved. It's a capacity problem. Which is why prevention — the part that can happen in a living room with a chair and a band — matters so much.
The one thing that changes the numbers
The best evidence we have is a 2019 Cochrane review of 108 trials involving 23,407 older people. Exercise reduced the rate of falls by 23%. Balance and functional training alone reduced it by 24%. Programmes combining balance work with resistance training reduced it by 34%.
The UK's Chief Medical Officers turn that into a simple instruction for everyone over 65: activities that improve strength, balance and flexibility on at least two days a week. Not a gym membership. Two short sessions.
NICE's 2025 falls guideline (NG249) says the same to clinicians: offer a progressive, tailored strength and balance programme to anyone at risk.
The programmes that put this into practice have their own numbers. The Otago home programme cut falls and fall injuries by 35% in its trials. FaME, the UK class-plus-home programme most strength-and-balance instructors are trained in, cut falls by 26% in a 1,256-person NHS trial and still returns £2.28 for every £1 spent, according to Public Health England's own model.
Why it matters more each year
None of this is getting smaller. Hip fractures are projected to double by 2060. There are already 1.5 million people in England living with moderate or severe frailty. And the pipeline is full: 42% of over-55s are classed as inactive, against 29% of adults overall. Muscle lost after 60 is hard to get back, and it goes fast when it goes — ten days in a hospital bed costs a healthy 67-year-old around a kilogram of leg muscle and 13% of their knee strength.
That's the case for prevention in one paragraph. The fall is expensive; the exercise is cheap; and the earlier it starts, the more it saves.
The numbers at a glance
- 1 in 3 over-65s and 1 in 2 over-80s fall each year
- 71,885 hip fractures in 2024 — projected to double by 2060
- 1 in 30 hospital beds occupied by hip-fracture recovery
- 235,000 emergency admissions for falls a year in England
- ~11,000 deaths a year — nearly half of all accidental deaths
- £2.3bn a year for hip fractures alone; £4.4bn for all fragility fractures
- 54% of over-70s fear falling; 38% have stopped doing things because of it
- 18% of severely frail people had a falls-risk assessment last year
- 79% of hip-fracture patients wait more than a week for community rehab
- 23% fewer falls with exercise; 34% with combined strength and balance programmes
- 2 days a week of strength and balance activity — the CMO recommendation
- £2.28 returned for every £1 spent on a FaME-type programme
This week
We'll take that instruction and make it practical.
Tuesday — what happened when Worcestershire County Council put 50,000 resistance bands and an exercise guide into residents' hands, and what the University of Worcester found when it measured the result.
Wednesday — the programme itself: eight chair-based exercises, ten minutes, twice a week, as a free printable 12-week guide.
Thursday — what to do after a fall. The first 48 hours, the first eight weeks, and why "rest is best" is the wrong advice.
Friday — where to go from here, and how organisations can replicate the Worcestershire model.
If you only do one thing this week, download Wednesday's guide and put two ten-minute sessions in next week's diary.
Sources: Office for Health Improvement & Disparities, Falls: applying All Our Health; National Hip Fracture Database Annual Report 2025; NHS England frailty resources; Zijlstra et al., Age and Ageing 2007; NHS England North West, Sept 2025 (NWAS data); RoSPA accident data via Centre for Ageing Better; NHS 10 Year Plan / NAO frailty figures; Sport England Active Lives; Kortebein et al., JAMA 2007; ProAct65+ trial (Iliffe et al.); Otago Exercise Programme manual; PHE Falls Prevention Return on Investment tool; National Audit Office, Primary and community healthcare support for people living with frailty, Dec 2025; Sherrington et al., Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2019 (CD012424); UK Chief Medical Officers' Physical Activity Guidelines; NICE NG249 (2025).
