Belmont's Barbara Harrison gets emotional about the benefits of fall prevention, having narrowly avoided serious injury at an ocean pool.
Mrs Harrison, 78, was sitting on a wide edge of the baths at Newport in Sydney when "a freak wave came along".
The force of the wave threw her backwards.
"I was on my way down headfirst to the rocks and sand a metre or so beneath," she said.
"I was able to grab the safety rail and hang on, even though I got bashed against the staircase railing."
At her regular exercise physiology class at Adamstown the following week, she was doing a particular exercise when she realised it saved her.
"My eyes started filling with tears because I knew it was that training that made me reach for the safety rail above my head," she said.
"I still feel emotional when I talk about it. As far as I'm concerned, that training saved my life that day."
The latest data shows fall-related hospital admissions among older people in the Hunter New England health district rose from 4349 in 2010 to 7347 in 2021 - a 70 per cent rise.
The Australian and New Zealand Falls Prevention Society has called for comment by February 25 on new national guidelines to prevent falls.
Among its recommendations were support for all older people to do exercises to prevent falls, while also encouraging them to "exercise two to three hours per week".
Last month, the NSW government released a free falls prevention program through its Active and Health website.
It lists the causes of falls as: weakening muscles and stiffening joints; side effects from medication; sensory and balance problems; not doing enough physical activity and poor diet.
A NSW government white paper on the issue, released in November, said "it can take a long time for a person to recover from a fall".
"Sometimes they may not recover at all. They may need to move to aged care or they may even die," it said.
"The healthcare costs due to falls are more than double the costs due to road trauma."
The paper forecast hospital-related falls to rise a further 45 per cent by 2041.
Adamstown senior exercise physiologist Mark Goswell said he was "seeing more and more people who have issues with balance, falls and loss of conditioning".
Mr Goswell, who is doing a PhD on core stability at University of Newcastle, said his driving force was "keeping people out of nursing homes".
"The key to that is maintaining activity and movement. The more we move, the better we are," he said.
"Age is just a number. No matter how old we are, we can continue to develop our strength and improve our function regardless of age."
He said it was a misconception that strengthening work required extreme exercises.
Simple and safe exercises "based around muscle activation" were effective.
"It can be as simple as strengthening exercises done in bed," he said.
Mrs Harrison has noticed numerous improvements since she began a fall prevention program at Mr Goswell's exercise physiology practice.
"I get out of bed and chairs much easier than I did. I feel there's been an improvement in my upper body strength as well," she said.
"I also think my concentration has improved. My children say 'you're not like we imagine an old lady to be'."
She did the program through a GP referral, which enables Medicare rebates for five sessions a year.
