Home visits
Two registered occupational therapists conducted home visits to those who reported accidental falls at home during the telephone follow-up. The therapist identified and documented environmental hazards using a standardized instrument - the Westmead Home Safety Assessment (WeHSA) [30], which is of satisfactory content validity and inter-rater reliability [31]. The WeHSA is a comprehensive environmental assessment that provides an extensive list of potential hazards about the environment and was developed as a tool for occupational therapists to identify environmental hazards in the homes of persons who are at risk of falling [30]. In order to compare the differences in domiciliary environments for older people with and without falls, we randomly selected from the study sample a group of non-fallers with same number of participants of each age strata that matched closely with that of the fallers on the age for home visits immediately after 12 months. They were used as controls for the comparison of domiciliary environments with that of fallers.