Falls among community-dwelling older adults are prevalent and have serious individual, societal and economic consequences. Allied health professionals provide key falls prevention interventions yet their representation in current clinical practice guidelines is inconsistent. Increased recognition of allied health roles and delivering context-specific guidelines for falls care could help to address workforce gaps and optimise care approaches. This scoping review explored the roles of the allied health professions in falls prevention screening, assessment and intervention for community-dwelling older adults.

Scoping review, using the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews.

PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, Cochrane, Web of Science and Allied and Complementary Medicine Database databases. The initial search was completed in November 2023, with a secondary search performed in July 2025.

Sources were eligible if they identified or described a specific role of at least one allied health professional in falls prevention care for older adults. No restrictions were placed on publication type or date. Study protocols and conference abstracts were excluded, and only English-language sources were included.

ChatGPT-4o was used for initial data extraction. Authors then cross-checked and updated inaccuracies as required. A numerical descriptive analysis, and a qualitative content analysis were performed to answer the research questions.

The search identified 442 relevant sources from 34 countries. The roles of 17 allied health professions in falls prevention for community-dwelling older adults were discussed. Screening, assessment and intervention roles were identified spanning medical, physical capacity, environmental, education and behavioural–psychological domains. Profession-specific interventions closely aligned with their primary scope of practice, and notable areas of overlap between professions were highlighted.

This review highlights the diverse and overlapping contributions of allied health professionals to falls prevention in community-dwelling older adults. Varying levels of evidence are available across the professions and evidence gaps were highlighted for smaller allied health professions, indicating a need for foundational research to substantiate their roles and facilitate their inclusion in future practice guidelines.

https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7SV3F.

To understand healthcare professionals’ views on current physiotherapy service provision in children with congenital heart disease (CHD), how physiotherapy could be better used post-cardiac surgery and perceived barriers to service expansion.

Cross-sectional survey using a one-off self-completed online questionnaire, with open and closed questions, in June–August 2024.

Each of the 12 level 1 paediatric cardiac surgical centres in the UK National Health Service and Children’s Health Ireland.

Healthcare professionals providing clinical care to children undergoing cardiac surgery.

80 responses were obtained, with at least one response from each centre. Healthcare professionals conduct motor, developmental and functional evaluations across all age groups, with referrals to physiotherapy primarily based on physical examination (39, 87%). They expressed dissatisfaction with community physiotherapy services (64, 81%) compared with inpatient services (29, 36%), although they indicated that expanding services would positively impact patients and families. There is a lack of consensus regarding intervention frequency, duration and which patient groups should be prioritised. Respondents identified a lack of funding as the primary barrier to service expansion (76, 95%). Reported barriers for families included volume of medical appointments (69, 86%), transportation (66, 83%) and finances (62, 78%).

Healthcare professionals appreciate the positive impact physiotherapy can have on post-surgical management of children with CHD. The importance of expanding services was emphasised. However, to effectively support clinical practice, it is crucial to understand which patient groups should be prioritised and at what stage, as well as determining the optimal amount of physiotherapy that positively impacts patient outcomes.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major global cause of morbidity and mortality. Emerging evidence in high-burden settings suggests significant long-term sequelae among people surviving TB; however, evidence from high-income, low-TB burden settings like Canada is lacking. In a person with TB infection, provision of TB preventive treatment (TPT) can prevent TB disease and its sequelae, but remains underused. We propose the Functional Outcomes, Lung health and Livelihood Outcomes among people With Tuberculosis study, a multicentre, prospective cohort study in Canada to help improve our understanding of the impacts of TPT and TB disease on individuals.

This is a prospective cohort study taking place in Montreal and Vancouver, Canada. We aim to recruit and retain at least 120 people with microbiologically confirmed TB disease, 340 people treated for TB infection and 120 without TB disease or infection who will be considered our unexposed group. All participants must be ≥6 years of age. Participants with TB disease or infection will be recruited within 2 weeks of treatment initiation. We will follow-up unexposed participants and participants with TB disease for 24 months, and participants with TB infection for 12 months. Throughout follow-up, participants will complete assessments measuring lung health and function, quality of life, disability, dyspnoea, psychological distress, as well as changes in employment and direct and indirect costs incurred because of treatment. Among participants with TB disease, our primary outcome is the difference in quality-adjusted life years between participants with TB disease and those unexposed at 24 months. For participants with TB infection, our primary outcome is the identification of non-patient characteristics (eg, patient cost, quality of life) associated with participant decision to discontinue treatment. Patient partners have contributed to the design of the study and will be involved with the study through to its dissemination.

This study has been approved by institutional ethics review boards at The Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (2025–10344) and The University of British Columbia (H24-02071). All participants will provide informed consent (and assent, if required) prior to participating in the study. We will disseminate study results to participants, national and international organisations, and through open-access peer-reviewed academic journals and conferences.

Multimorbidity is prevalent and associated with complex treatment requirements. In order to assist general practitioners (GPs) addressing these requirements, the web application gp-multitool.de has been designed, which facilitates implementation of the German clinical practice guideline for multimorbidity. We will conduct a cluster-randomised clinical trial evaluating an intervention based on this tool. This protocol summarises methods and discusses ethics and dissemination of this study.

Participating patients are recruited by cooperating GP practices. Inclusion criteria are an age of 65 years or older, enrolment in any disease management programme and multimorbidity operationalised by two additional chronic conditions. To avoid postrandomisation selection bias, practices are randomised as clusters after baseline assessment of all participating patients from the respective practice. In our intervention, patients receive access to different assessments including patient preferences by email, fill out the electronic assessment forms on any device with access to the internet, receive a medication review and discuss the assessment results with their GPs. GPs in the control group do not have access to the digital tool and provide care as usual. The primary outcome is staying at least once for at least one night in hospital during the 12-month observation period. Secondary outcomes are contacts with GPs and outpatient specialists, self-reported health, health-related quality of life, patient satisfaction and GP-reported and patient-reported quality of care. A sample size of 660 patients from 66 GP practices is needed. Data are analysed by mixed effects regression models.

Ethics approval was obtained by the ethics committee of the Medical Association of Hamburg (2022–1 00 786-BO-ff). Study results will be presented on scientific conferences and published in journal articles. In addition, healthcare professionals, patient representatives and the interested public will be informed about study results at a symposium.

The study was registered in clinicaltrials.gov (NCT06831994).