Public Education for Elderly on How to Spot Impending Dizzy Spells to Prevent Falls and Injuries

7 Ms Joan Pereira asked the Minister for Health whether the Ministry can guide the elderly through public education on how to spot signs and symptoms of an impending dizzy spell so that they can prevent a fall and causing injury to themselves.

The Senior Minister of State for Health (Dr Amy Khor Lean Suan) (for the Minister for Health): Seniors fall due to many reasons such as giddiness and loss of muscle strength. MOH and the Health Promotion Board (HPB) have been working with community partners and healthcare clusters to raise awareness on falls prevention through public education, exercise programmes and campaigns. Let me cite a few examples.

Under the National Seniors' Health Programme, regular health talks and workshops are conducted at various community touchpoints to educate seniors on falls prevention. Over 6,000 seniors have attended these health talks across the past year, acquiring tips such as removing clutter in the home to pre-empt the risks of falls. Seniors on long-term medication for several medical conditions are also advised to consult a doctor for a medication review at least once a year, as a possible side effect of taking multiple medications concurrently includes dizziness.

Seniors are encouraged to exercise regularly, and to do strength, balance and flexibility exercises at least twice a week. This helps to delay age-related loss of muscle mass and strength, which reduces the risk of falls. The HPB holds weekly senior exercise classes in more than 600 community spaces island-wide and more than 50,000 seniors attended these classes in 2019.

The HPB also piloted "Rolling Good Times" in 2018, a programme to raise awareness of common falls situations, improve seniors' strength and balance through exercises, and teach them how to minimise the risk of injuries during a fall. To date, some 160 seniors have participated in the pilot programme and most have shown improvement in their strength, balance and flexibility. Hence, HPB intends to reach out to more seniors by progressively rolling out the programme to more community nodes nationwide.

Targeting pre-frail and frail seniors, the Healthy Ageing Promotion Programme For You (HAPPY) programme implemented by the National University Health System engages seniors in exercises combined with cognitive activities. Such dual-task exercises have been shown to stimulate cognitive functions and improve physical ability, preventing dementia and frailty as well as reducing one's risk for falls. More than 700 seniors have participated in HAPPY as of January this year.

Although senior-centric activities have been temporarily suspended since March 2020 due to COVID-19, many organisations have since adapted most of their activities and classes to online content so that our seniors can continue to stay active and engaged while at home.

Lastly, HPB had organised Falls Prevention Awareness campaigns in 2016 and 2017 to provide seniors and their care-givers with information on how to reduce the risk of falls. As part of the campaigns, educational videos and guidebooks were produced for seniors and their care-givers. These resources remain available online.

MOH and the healthcare family will continue to strengthen our efforts to reduce the risk of falls among our senior population.

Mr Speaker: Ms Joan Pereira.

Ms Joan Pereira (Tanjong Pagar): Thank you, Speaker. I thank the Senior Minister of State for her reply. I have one supplementary question. Many elderly fall at home and sometimes their families did not even realise till after some time. For those who live alone, it could be an even longer lag time before someone discovered the elderly had fallen.

With this in mind, may I ask how MOH or perhaps HPB can deploy more wearable fall detection alarm devices for elderly, especially those who have been assessed by medical professionals to have a higher risk of falling and perhaps even those who live alone.

Dr Amy Khor Lean Suan: I thank the Member for her supplementary question. First, let me say that for seniors living alone, we have, for instance, our Silver Generation Ambassadors, who call or visit them to check on them and see how they are doing. We also work with other Community Partners and VWOs to check on these seniors.

Indeed, we are also looking at various ways to detect falls and then raise the alarm to the community either at the Senior Activity Centre or to other various partners. There are actually many commercial wearable devices and products that can help to detect falls and then trigger an alarm for assistance should the wearer fall and these are useful for detecting falls, especially for seniors with higher risk of falling. But, I think what we need to do is to carefully analyse the evidence available to see how effective they can be if we implement it at scale because we need to scale this up for a rapidly ageing population and increasingly more seniors living alone.

The Government is also exploring other solutions. For instance, alert alarm systems. So, Smart Nation and Digital Government Office or SNDGO and MOH are currently trialing out a personal alert button in some homes of seniors living in Tampines. So, this trial is one of the Internet of Things initiative under the Smart Nation Sensor platform. It is really to enable us to get feedback from the user on this prototype to see how we can develop, design and develop a cost-effective, lightweight as well as easily deployable personal alert button system. What we are doing now is to extend this device beyond Tampines, to homes of seniors living in 53 1-room rental blocks across the island. This new personal alert button, which when triggered, is either connected to a Senior Activity Centre or if it is not available, then to Careline, which will then assess the kind of assistance we need to give to the seniors.

What is also important is that actually for all these variables and these personal alert systems, you trigger an alarm for assistance after the fall, after the seniors have fallen. In fact, what we want to do is to proactively prevent occurrence of such falls as much as possible.

So, the best strategy still is really to focus upstream on falls prevention, pre-empting the falls, addressing the risk of falling through our multi-pronged effort which I have actually highlighted in terms of falls prevention, awareness programmes, getting the seniors to exercise regularly, especially to improve strength, balance, flexibility, nutrition to maintain or reduce or delay the loss of muscle mass and to build strong bones as well as getting rid of clutter in the homes and so on.

In fact, during this COVID-19 period especially, when we ask seniors to stay at home because they are the most vulnerable, in order to ensure that they can still remain active and engaged, HPB, for instance, has got a series of a workout sessions that they have put on their YouTube channel. These have garnered about 61,000 views till date.

We have also worked with Mediacorp to launch Season two of "乐学每疫刻" or "Learn Together With Me", which started just yesterday and will last till the 15 May, Monday to Friday 2.30 pm to 3.00 pm, for the seniors who are interested. That includes talks as well as exercise programmes to help the seniors remain active and healthy. It will also be shown on Suria and Vasantham after Channel 8, so I would encourage you to get the seniors to also view this.