Get the Home Safety Playbook

What this playbook covers

The playbook is designed for exactly one job: walk the house with a pen and fix the things that most reliably cause falls. Every chapter names the specific interventions that CDC STEADI and occupational therapy home-safety practice have shown move the needle, ranked by evidence and value per dollar. Here is what the 20 pages actually contain.

• How to walk a home like an occupational therapist. The pattern OTs use — starting at the front door, moving room by room, watching for transfer paths — and the questions they ask about the person who lives there.
• The bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen, the stairs. Four rooms carry the majority of falls. Twelve bathroom changes, five bedroom transfer-path fixes, six kitchen reachable-storage moves, and the handrail and contrast rules for stairs and hallways.
• Medication safety and the fall-fatigue connection. Pill organizers, the expiration audit most families skip, and the specific side-effect combinations that cause the medication-triggered nighttime fall.
• Adaptive equipment on a budget. Which grab bars, transfer poles, bed rails, and cushions are worth buying, which the marketing overpromises, and where a $30 solution outperforms a $300 one.
• The 42-item walk-through checklist. A printable room-by-room instrument you carry through the house, ticking off what is already safe and marking what still needs attention.
• When home is no longer safe. The honest chapter for families who have run the checklist twice and still have a parent falling. What the threshold looks like and how families talk about it without breaking.

What you will do with it in the first 7 days

Day one is the walk. You print the 42-item checklist, spend about 90 minutes going room by room, and mark each item green (already safe), yellow (needs attention), or red (fix this week). Most families come out of the first walk with 12 to 18 items in the yellow and red columns. Day two is the shopping list — non-slip mats, night lights, a bed rail, a raised toilet seat, grab bars — and most families spend under $180 on the first-round essentials.

Day three through five is installation. The playbook names which items are safe do-it-yourself and which need a stud finder or a handyman, so you do not put a grab bar in drywall alone and pull it out at 3 a.m. Day six is the medication audit; you sit down with the pill bottles and Chapter 8's cross-check list. Day seven is the transfer-path test — you walk the bathroom, bedroom, and stairs the way your parent actually walks them, at the time of day the falls tend to happen. Seven days, one house, roughly 80 percent of preventable-fall risk removed.

How the delivery works

The flow is deliberately small. Enter your email in the form below and click the button. Within thirty seconds we send a confirmation message from hello at morriselder dot com — open it and click the confirm link. Within five minutes of that click, the download link arrives in your inbox from the same address. Corporate mail servers occasionally add two or three minutes of delay; if the email does not appear, check your promotions or spam folder and mark the message as not spam so the rest of the course lands where you can see it. The thank-you page in your browser also carries the download link inline as a backup for the next 24 hours.

Once you confirm, you join the free 12-part Family Caregiver Foundation course. One email every three or four days for about five weeks, each 400 to 600 words. Estimated reading time for the playbook itself is 40 to 55 minutes for a full pass, though most families skip straight to the walk-through checklist and read the chapters as they hit each room. Unsubscribe with one click at any point and your address leaves every list within one business day.

Our editorial ethics, in three sentences

We do not accept payment from grab-bar retailers, medical-alert vendors, or home-modification contractors to include their names in any playbook, and we do not sell subscriber data or swap lists with any partner. We send at most one email per week after the 12-part course completes, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link. If you write back with a question about your specific house, a real person on the editorial team reads and replies personally — the reply address is monitored, not automated.

What to read next on morriselder.com

If you want to keep reading while you wait for the download email to arrive, three flagship articles pair naturally with this playbook.

• Fall prevention at home: the 12 changes that actually work — the condensed article that got you here.
• Medication management for a parent on 8 prescriptions — the pill-box honesty audit.
• Helping someone with dementia in the shower — where home safety meets the hardest daily task.

Common questions about the playbook