Falls are a leading cause of serious injury, hospitalisation, loss of independence, and premature entry into aged care for older Australians. While there is strong evidence about effective falls prevention interventions, decision-making remains fragmented across health, aged care, and community settings. As a result, preventable harm often emerges downstream as serious incidents, regulatory concern, and system pressure.

Our team has developed a working prototype system dynamics model that simulates how different falls prevention strategies affect system-level outcomes over time. The prototype has been technically tested and validated and can already model impacts across:

• Community and aged care settings

• Health service use and downstream consequences

• Short- and medium-term health and economic outcomes relevant to policy decisions

The next step is improving policy relevance and real-world applicability. This project focuses on strengthening the model’s usefulness for real policy and system decisions. This will be done across three project phases: