Falls Prevention Strategy

The National Falls Prevention Strategy (NFPS) aims to reduce the incidence and severity of injury from falls, and guides the activities of Government, health agencies, service providers, non-government and community organisations to provide services in a coordinated and collaborative way. It is hoped that by building effective leadership, improving knowledge, developing effective interventions and resources, plus creating safer environments, injuries caused by falls will reduce. ACC is the lead agency for the NFPS, which is one of the New Zealand Injury Prevention Strategy’s (NZIPS) priority areas.

Falls in New Zealand

Falls account for a number of significant injuries among all age groups in New Zealand. Falls are the leading cause of injury hospitalisation, and one of the top three leading causes of injury-related death in New Zealand.

Current interventions

The following ACC interventions focus on older adults, as they can be more at risk of falling:

Download the Strategy and Implementation Plan

To read the Strategy, download:

To read about the how the Strategy is being implemented, download ACC2565 Preventing Injury from Falls: Implementation Plan 2006 – 2010 (PDF318K).

To find out how to implement a project to prevent injuries in your community, download ACC5209 Preventing injuries in your community (PDF3.0M).

Preventing injuries in your community

The most successful way to reduce injuries and make our communities safer is to get people in the community to make it happen.

This start-to-finish guide has been developed for community groups when planning an injury prevention project. Within the booklet, there is information on how to get started, what you need to do, how to manage budgets and monitor results.

To read the guidelines, download:

Or to order go to our publications page.

Contact us

For more information, you can contact us at fallstrategy@acc.co.nz.

Published: 2June2010