More than 5,000 elderly people fell out of hospital or nursing home beds in the course of a year, according to confidential reports.

Older people accounted for around 29,260 reported accidents and near misses during 2009 although many other cases are likely to have happened but not been accounted for.

The reports, which relate to facilities funded by the Health Service Executive (HSE), are made on a confidential basis by staff to a central database compiled by the State Claims Agency which handles compensation cases.

The reports showed that nearly one in six of the incidents involving older patients arose out of them falling out of their bed during the year.

In nearly one in two cases, however, the incident involved the older patient falling while they were moving without the supervision of a member of staff.

Another 15pc of incidents involved the patient falling from a chair and 1,900 were the victims of some medication error.

In around five per cent of the cases involving older people there was violence, harassment or aggression involved either from staff or other patients.

Overall, there were 83,867 accidents or near misses involving all age groups reported to the database during the year, a report by the State Claims Agency has revealed.

The incidents involving older patients were more than three times those which occurred in younger age groups. But most of these are preventable.

The report pointed out that one in 10 patients admitted to hospital is the victim of an accident or near miss. In around 15pc of these cases the patient is injured and 10pc die.

"In one study adverse events led to a mean increase in length of stay of eight days," it said. In relation to older people there is an urgent need to bring in a wide-ranging falls-prevention strategy.

"Many falls are preventable and a recent review concluded there was reasonable evidence of a reduction in falls through multi-faceted falls-prevention programmes."

These focus on a variety of measures, some of which are tailored to the individual patient. The use of information based on observing older people and analysis of incidents should inform how to target falls prevention and ensure effective learning by staff.

Only a fraction of the cases reported to the database end up in a compensation claim but the information is useful to the agency in seeing where the danger areas are.

It is then able to alert a particular institution to where there are weaknesses in the system which need to be worked out to reduce the risk to the patient.

 http://www.independent.ie/health/latest-news/thousands-of-elderly-patients-suffer-accidents-in-hospital-2508029.html