Just in time for Fall Prevention week, Sept. 22-26, 2025, the National Council on Aging announced the publication of the 2025 National Falls Prevention Action Plan. A national steering committee, which included representatives from agencies serving older people who are blind or low vision. Included in the plan are six goals aimed at reducing or preventing falls among older people, whose chance of falling is 1 in 4, according to the CDC. Older individuals who are blind or low vision are twice as likely to fall as other older people (About Vision Impairment and Falls Among Older Adults | Vision and Eye Health | CDC).
The six recommendations are as follows:
- Expand public awareness, messaging, and advocacy.
- Broaden funding across sectors.
- Scale evidence-based and proven interventions by increasing the number of interventions with sizes and capacities sufficient to meet the needs of people at risk of falls, particularly those in underserved communities and those with the greatest social and economic need.
- Drive more clinical and community partnerships.
- Generate new technologies and expand access to existing technologies by public and private partners so that products meet the unique needs of older people and are accessible to them.
- Improve data by increasing the quality and range of information, both quantitative and qualitative, about why older people fall and under what circumstances (the functional, activity, environmental, and personal factors).
The report includes recommendations regarding older people experiencing vision loss:
- Establish a Community Advisory Council (CAC) comprised of organizations and people representing the full range of key audiences that the campaign seeks to reach. Engage the CAC to review the gap analysis and point to dissemination opportunities and partners, particularly in historically and currently marginalized communities at higher risk for falls and falls injury, as well as special populations including people with vision loss, hearing loss, dementia, and neurological conditions (p. 14)
- Invite a broad array of national and international falls experts and organizational stakeholders to stakeholder think tanks, including many organizations, as well as representatives of people who have vision loss and those who are hard of hearing, among others. (p. 71)
- Under the research goal, include advocacy groups representing populations to be studied – those with MS, spinal cord injury, vision and hearing limitations, etc. – to be involved in setting the implementation research agenda. (p. 78)
Learn more
Read more information and tips about fall prevention on APH VisionAware: From Awareness to Action: Preventing Falls – ConnectCenter