Abstract
Drago owns her own product safety consulting firm, Drago Expert Services, and from this platform has produced resources that address safety across the life span. In addition to Living Safely, Aging Well, Drago wrote From Crib to Kindergarten—The Essential Child Safety Guide, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2007 and included by Library Journal as one of its Best Consumer Health Books of 2007. Drago has also developed a podcast and published additional chapters with other authors on the topic of child safety. Living Safely, Aging Well appears to represent a new foray by Drago into safety in the other end of the life span, old age.
Drago’s book Living Safely, Aging Well begins with a satisfactory review of the demographics of population aging and the larger context of “aging well,” including the growing scope of aging Baby Boomers who would be affected by efforts to prevent injuries at home. Drago highlights the unique independence of Baby Boomers and thus the additional incentive to avoid injury to maintain their independent lifestyles. Drago underlines that avoiding injury contributes to the maintenance of better health.
Drago clearly brings her expertise as a product safety design evaluator to her thorough presentation of safety considerations at home, making the book a valuable resource to students, educators, and trainers who would be working with or impacting older adults. Her comprehensive treatment of topics includes, for example, discussion of “sense of balance” and “sense of core body temperature” as two senses not usually included with the usual five (vision, hearing, smell, taste, and feeling). She expertly transitions from a discussion of these senses to how they relate to fall risks in an individual’s environment, whether at home or another location. Drago is sensitive to and addresses age-related vulnerabilities and their contributions to risk as well, such as the stigma associated with wearing hearing aids, and consequently how this can contribute to misperception of one’s environment and potential falls. She elaborates her treatment of ageism even beyond fall risk to educate readers about the dangers of using “elderspeak” with an individual who has impaired hearing, as it can reinforce negative stereotypes about aging and inappropriately impose an “old” identity. Drago brings similar depth to her description of scenarios that result from “multiple age-related sensory deprivations . . . synergistically interacting” to create risky situations for older adults (p. 14). A younger person without sensory impairment may not think of the risks related to loss—and synergies of losses—that they do not yet experience, and Drago helps to illustrate such risk for the younger generations. Drago also emphasizes the importance of understanding why individuals fall, and not just “that falls are a common source of injury” (p. 18). With each of Drago’s examples and context-specific description of risks, she helps to understand this “why” in detail.
Much of Drago’s material could be adapted for supplemental materials serving family and professional caregivers. For example, in her discussion of vision impairment and subsequent fall risks, Drago effectively incorporates sample photographs to illustrate the experience of cataract, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy. This type of content would be perfect to replicate in a smaller laminated booklet with key content from the book that could be immediately applied in family or professional care work. Drago’s accompanying description of the far-reaching implications of sensory impairment for quality of life could also be adapted for alternative materials. She writes,
As can happen to people with hearing loss, some people with diminished vision begin to withdraw because they feel uncomfortable in their surroundings. They may choose not to go out, insecure because they can’t get around well. They may alter their gait, adopting a more cautious way of walking. Feeling at risk may make them limit what they do, which in turn can affect their social and other activities, and lead to depression. (p. 10)
Such implications could be foundational for suggested program interventions that could also be included in an illustrated, laminated guide or selection of fact sheets for caregivers and families. Additional example book content that would be easily applicable to a fact sheet for caregivers, families, and older adults themselves is Drago’s “Summary of Steps to Reduce Intrinsic Fall Risk Factors” (p. 30). The summary is brief, clear, and divided into four succinct, illustrated recommendations. Drago’s figure that simply describes and diagrams “getting up safely after a fall” would also be easily transferrable to a fact sheet format that would be a quick reference for caregivers and families, as would her “Fire and Burn Safety Checklist” and “Recommended Food Storage Times and Temperatures” (pp. 45, 64, 88). Drago herself recommends to physicians to “consider utilizing several different ways to deliver information: drawings or diagrams, videos, pamphlets or brochures, websites, storytelling, and so on” (p. 151).
My primary critique of this book is that there is a mismatch between the nature of the resource and the author’s intended audience. The intended audience is not framed as students, educators, and trainers. Drago emphasizes that the audience of her book is as follows:
Whether you are an older person looking out for your own safety, an adult child taking care of parents, or a caregiver helping someone stay safe from injury in the home, this book should provide much helpful—indeed critical—information. (pp. 1-2)
The book’s topics and descriptions fluctuate in tone and are often technical, despite the author’s efforts to make them user-friendly for lay people. Such topics and descriptions include, for example, changes in sensory perception that accompany aging as well as potential hazards in various contexts of living. As an illustration of the book’s technical tone, in the second chapter (titled “Don’t Fall!”), Drago discusses how to reduce “intrinsic” and “extrinsic fall risk factors.” Although Drago does make an effort to define such fall factors and to give substantial, concrete examples of how to prevent falls, the terms themselves are not those that most lay people would use, including older adults and family caregivers. Some content, such as that reviewing products related to fire risk (e.g., fire pots and circuit interrupters), is dense and extensive, providing possibly too much information for a family caregiver or older adult reader. Additional effort is needed to translate this kind of information into a form that is more accessible to readers who would eventually use and adopt the various recommendations provided. Although the content deserves great detail, this detail may unfortunately overwhelm older adult and family caregiver readers who are not themselves students, educators, or trainers.
In addition to some ambiguity between the presented material and its intended audience, the book also mixes second and third person in referring to the older adult readership; the third person creates more of a distance with the potential older adult reader. Once clarifying the audience, Drago may find it easier to be consistent with tone. There are some sections that fluctuate between being more anecdotal or conjectural and research-based. For example, when discussing an example of a food safety practice study conducted in England, Drago writes, “If such a study were conducted in the United States, I venture to say that the results would be about the same” (p. 85).
The book’s informative topics and descriptions, bolstered by some scholarly literature review, however, would make it a valuable resource for students, their professors, and trainers of health professionals—people who will be learning the content themselves for immediate application when working with older adults, or people who will be training and educating others soon to be serving an older adult population. Pending hypothetical funding for development, the book could be accompanied by supplemental materials that would be used by students, trainers, and educators in their work with older adults and their families. The author’s company Drago Expert Services would be a perfect context to develop additional products to accompany Living Safely, Aging Well that might serve as dynamic multimedia companion pieces to the book that would then be accessible to older adults and their family and professional caregivers.