Home Safety Assessment
Most falls at home come from a handful of fixable hazards: a missing grab bar, a loose rug, a dark staircase. This room-by-room check turns a worried walk-through into a clear, prioritized plan.
Walk through your parent's home and tick anything that is true right now. When you are done, you will get a fix list ordered by risk, which you can print or save as a PDF. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere, this is just for you.
Your Home Safety Plan
From the ElderHearth home safety assessment, elderhearth.com
No hazards flagged yet
That is a good sign. Walk the home one more time at night, when poor lighting and night trips to the bathroom expose the hazards a daytime check can miss.
Most of these fixes are cheap, and the bigger ones (a ramp, a curbless shower, a stair lift) have funding you can check. Price them with our cost calculator, read the full room-by-room safety guide, or reach out. For anything beyond the basics, an occupational therapist can assess the home in person.
Where do most falls at home happen?
The bathroom. The CDC finds that 72.8% of older-adult falls happen at home, and 35.7% of those in-home injuries occur in the bathroom. That is why this assessment starts there, with grab bars, a non-slip surface, and a night light for the trip at night. Stairs and loose rugs come next: the CDC ties nearly 38,000 older-adult emergency-room visits a year to falls involving rugs and carpets alone.
What should I fix first?
Start with the high-risk items in the bathroom and on the stairs, because that is where the most serious falls happen. The good news is that the highest-impact basics, grab bars, better lighting, automatic night lights, and securing or removing loose rugs, often total under $500 and can be done in a weekend. Bigger projects like a ramp, a curbless shower, or a stair lift come later, once you have priced them and checked what help pays. You can estimate those with our aging in place cost calculator.
Is this a professional assessment?
No. This is a guided self-check to help you spot the common hazards and act on the easy ones quickly. For anything beyond the basics, an occupational therapist can assess the home in person and is often covered after a fall or hospital stay. The specs here follow CDC falls data and ADA guidance on ramps.
For the full detail behind each fix, read our room-by-room home safety guide, our bathroom safety guide, or how to prevent falls. The right handful of changes is what keeps a parent safely at home.