Colerain Township, like many communities across the state, has seen an increase in calls for help from people who have fallen in their homes. Now it's using a grant from the AARP to install grab bars in people's homes for free.
"We had 12,000 calls last year, and 14% of those were falls. So we do a lot of falls — falls and fall calls — and big injuries can come from those falls where you have to go the hospital, you have to have surgery, you're going to a rehab facility; and all those things add up, and that can be detrimental to people," explains Community Paramedic Chelsea Gehring.
She says that got the fire department thinking about ways they could help people stay safe in their homes, and reduce calls for falls. Especially since the number of elderly people in the township is growing, following a national trend of people living longer.
According to 2023 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, falls are the leading cause of injury for adults age 65 and older. Older adults also have higher death rates from unintentional falls than adults in other age groups.
Nearly 59,000 people live in Colerain, and according to census data, about 16% are age 65 or older, and the median resident age is about 10% higher than Hamilton County in general.
Colerain officials say they don't know of any other fire department that has a community paramedic like Gehring.
How the grab bar program works
Gehring doesn't just show up and install a grab bar. She performs a home safety inspection and a full medical assessment.
"We take that information that we've learned from these tests and from these assessments when we talk about them, so that you are able to have a little bit more understanding of what your fall risk might be," she explains.
Then she installs grab bars wherever they're most needed. Frequently that's the bathroom, but also in garage entries, bedrooms, or near couches or chairs that are hard to get up from or maybe are on a slippery surface.
"When we do the walk assessments, we look and see [if you] are you grabbing onto the wall here? Are you leaning onto the couch here? Would there be a better spot for you to grab onto, somewhere that is more stable... has a wall — you can't really grab onto a wall, but you could grab onto a bar," she says.
The bars are available in several color options so they can be matched to someone's bathroom tile, for example.
She installed bars in 50 homes last year. This year's grant just came through, so she's hoping to reach at least 60 people this year.
The program appears to be working
Gehring says the data is still preliminary since the program hasn't been around very long, but it is showing results.
"We've had people who were having nine to 14 or 15 calls [for help] six months prior to our grab bar Installation. We put in the bar, and then ... in the three to six months [following] we've had those 14, those nine, go down to zero, sometimes one. So that's a huge difference," she says.
Gehring reaches out to people after they've called for help. She also gets word-of-mouth referrals. She says most people are surprised to learn the program exists and is free.
"It's good for the township, selfishly, I think, because it reduces 911 calls. We are happy to make the 911 calls, but when we don't have those people who are falling all the time, we know that they're safe. They're in their home, they're healthy, they're safe inside their home," she points out. "Ultimately, that's what we want as a community — people to be safe and taken care of inside their homes."
Personally, she likes knowing she's giving people back a little bit of their independence.
"It's great to see the impact," she says. "They're able to take better care of themselves. They're able to independently shower. They're able to independently bathe themselves. They're able to get in and out of bed, things that they might have been leery of doing alone or doing by themselves or depending on somebody else to do for them."
Ghering's community paramedicine role extends beyond the grab bar program. She's part of the Quick Response Team that was the first in the state created to respond to the opioid epidemic. She also reaches out to people following other 911 calls to help people find rides to medical appointments, working with them to get their insurance to cover certain things, and more.
The township's Transparency Lab breaks down the Colerain Township (Hamilton Cnty) / Fire & EMS - Run Volume. This data shows emergency medical calls outweigh fire calls. A Colerain spokesperson notes that split is estimated to grow more with an aging population.
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