NFPA's Remembering When™

A Fire and Fall Prevention Program for Older Adults

Fact: At age 65, older adults are twice as likely to be killed or injured by fires or falls compared to the population at large.

Fact: Thirty percent of people age 65 and older are involved in falls each year, the leading cause of death from unintentional injury in the home.

Fact: In the U.S. and Canada, adults age 65 and older make up about 12 percent of the population – and their numbers are increasing.

Remembering When™ – "A Fire and Fall Prevention Program for Older Adults" was developed by the NFPA Center for High-Risk Outreach and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help older adults live safely at home for as long as possible.

Remembering When™ is centered around 16 key safety messages – eight fire prevention and eight fall prevention – developed by experts and practitioners from national and local safety organizations as well as through focus group testing in the high-fire-risk states of Alaska, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and in Cleveland and Atlanta.

Because no single agency can be responsible for reaching every older adult in your community, Remembering When™ was designed to be implemented by a coalition comprising the local fire department, service clubs, social and religious organizations, retirement communities, and others. Together, members of the coalition can decide how to best approach the local senior population: through group presentations, during home visits, and/or as part of a smoke alarm installation and fall intervention program.

"Like all of us, older adults enjoy educational opportunities that are fun and interactive," says Sharon Gamache, executive director of the NFPA's Center for High-Risk Outreach. "So we made Remembering When™ informative as well as entertaining. We built our activities and lesson plans around a theme of nostalgia and scattered fun references to music, events, and personalities from days gone by throughout the program."

Remembering When™ contains everything you need – reproducible handouts, lesson plans, checklists, fact sheets, resource lists, a trivia game, and brochures – to effectively communicate fire and fall prevention messages to older adults in your community.

For more information about Remembering When™ in our community, please contact Forrest Owens at (250)-544-4240 or through e-mail.