The quality and applicability of clinical practice guidelines for falls prevention, assessment and management across the lifespan: A systematic review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The burden of falls across the lifespan is substantial. Given the variety of clinical practice guidelines available for falls management, it is useful to understand the quality and clinical applicability of guidelines and their recommendations. Objective: To assess the quality and applicability of clinical practice guidelines for falls prevention, assessment and management across the lifespan. Design: Systematic review, reported in line with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. Data Sources: CINAHL, Cochrane, Embase, MEDLINE, PsycINFO and grey literature databases were searched from January 2016 to April 2025. Methods: Two investigators assessed the methodological quality of the guidelines and recommendations based on the eligibility criteria established a priori. Scaled domain scores were calculated for AGREE II and AGREE-REX. Results: Eleven guidelines met the eligibility criteria and were included for analysis. Most provided recommendations for older adults with only two guidelines focused on adults. AGREE II scores ranged from 32 % to 83 %, while AGREE-REX scores ranged from 39 % to 56 %. Three guidelines were of high quality (≥70 %): (1) 2017 Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario, (2) 2025 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and (3) 2022 World Falls Guideline. Conclusion: This systematic review identified gaps in evidence-based guidelines for falls prevention, particularly for individuals under 65. Variations in guideline quality suggest the need for refined development processes, emphasizing stakeholder involvement and applicability. Despite limitations in the current evidence, this review offers a foundation for future guideline development, highlighting the importance of developing inclusive, evidence-based guidelines to address falls for children and adults under the age of 65. Registration: The review protocol was registered in the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO registration CRD42023446557). Tweetable Abstract: Gaps in fall prevention, assessment, and management guidelines emphasize the need for evidence-based recommendations for children and adults under the age of 65.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it