The call usually comes from a hospital corridor. A parent has fallen at home, the hip is broken, surgery is tomorrow or was this morning, and the daughter on the phone is already thinking past the ward to the question nobody has answered yet: what happens when she goes home?
This page is written for that daughter, and for the parent. It is not medical advice and it does not replace the care team, the physiotherapist or the discharge planner, who know the actual case. What it does is set out, in plain language, what the public Canadian standards say good hip fracture care looks like, where people tend to go after the hospital, and what a household can set up for the months that follow. We are Bedford Medical Alert®, a Canadian monitoring company, and we say where our interest lies in the section where it belongs.
Ontario Health publishes a quality standard for hip fracture care, first published in February 2024, and its opening paragraph is the plainest description of why those months matter. About 12,000 people in Ontario experience a hip fracture every year. Of those who had been independent before the fracture, the standard says, another 20 per cent will be admitted to long-term care within a year, and less than half will be able to walk without aids afterwards. The standard covers adults aged 50 and older from the moment they arrive at the emergency department until three months after surgery, and it defines a fragility hip fracture as one caused by low-energy trauma, such as a fall from standing height.
Osteoporosis Canada adds the figure that shapes the rest of this page. One in three hip fracture patients will fracture again within one year, and more than one in two will suffer another fracture within five years. Osteoporosis, it says, causes 70 to 90 per cent of the roughly 30,000 hip fractures in Canada each year, and fewer than 20 per cent of fracture patients in Canada currently undergo diagnosis or adequate treatment for it.
Those are national and provincial figures, not a prediction for any one person, and the broader statistics on falls among older Canadians are on our page on seniors’ falls in Canada. What the figures do say is that the months after a hip fracture are a planning problem as much as a healing one.
Ontario Health’s standard is written as fifteen quality statements, and it comes with a patient guide whose subtitle is “Know what to ask for in your care”. Six of the statements are the ones a family is most likely to hear about on the ward, and we report them here as the standard’s words, not ours.
Surgery as soon as possible, within 48 hours of first arriving at any hospital. Being helped up and bearing weight as tolerated within 24 hours of surgery, then mobilized every day. Information for patients, families and care partners, tailored and delivered at the right points in the care. A rehabilitation program with an interprofessional team, in an inpatient setting, a community setting or both, with the goal of returning to the level of function the person had before the fracture. A fracture risk assessment in hospital from a clinician with osteoporosis expertise, with osteoporosis medications offered when appropriate. And at discharge, two appointments already booked: a primary care follow-up within two weeks, and an orthopaedic follow-up within 12 weeks of surgery.
The 48-hour statement is the one Canada measures nationally. The Canadian Institute for Health Information tracks the risk-adjusted share of hip fractures treated surgically within 48 hours of admission, and in its September 2026 update the figure for 2025 to 2026 was 83.6 per cent for Canada. Provinces vary: Ontario sat at 86.3 per cent and Alberta at 87.3, both above the national average, while British Columbia, at 75.7 per cent, was below it. CIHI notes that higher rates are desirable.
None of this is a checklist for a family to enforce. It is a vocabulary. A daughter who knows the standard calls for two booked follow-ups can ask, on the day of discharge, whether both dates are in hand.
Home is not the only destination, and it helps to know that before the discharge conversation starts. Osteoporosis Canada cites a study in which only 44 per cent of people discharged from hospital after a hip fracture went home. Ten per cent went to another hospital, 27 per cent to rehabilitation care, and 17 per cent to a long-term care facility. The Ontario standard’s rehabilitation statement allows for an inpatient program, a community program, or a combination, so the route home may run through a rehabilitation bed first, or through therapists who come to the house.
Whichever route it is, the generic homecoming checklist, the questions to ask the discharge team, the first 72 hours, the equipment to have in place, is on our page on coming home from the hospital. This page does not repeat it. What follows is specific to the hip.
The provincial patient guides agree on the home itself. Alberta Health Services’ guide after a hip fracture, written by its Bone and Joint Health network and current as of February 2025, carries a tips-for-a-safe-home page that includes removing throw rugs, installing a rail along one side of the stairs, moving electrical cords, keeping often-used items within reach, and in the bathroom grab bars, a bath bench, a raised toilet seat and a rubber-backed mat. The hospital’s own discharge instructions govern; the guide is a useful second read for the family member doing the shopping.
Two appointments and one question belong on the calendar before the first week is out. The appointments are the ones the Ontario standard says should already be booked at discharge, with the family doctor and with the orthopaedic service. The question is about bone health. The standard calls for a fracture risk assessment while the person is still in hospital; Osteoporosis Canada reports that fewer than 25 per cent of people who have had a hip fracture receive medication to prevent a future one, against 80 per cent who receive preventive medication after a heart attack, and it points to Fracture Liaison Services as the programs built to close that gap. Whether any of that applies is a conversation for the care team. Knowing to ask is the family’s part.
Bringing a parent home after hip surgery and working out who is there in the hours nobody can be? Our complimentary consultations happen by phone, at 1-888-755-3055, and we can walk you through how a response plan is set up for the recovery months.
The figure to plan around is the re-fracture rate: one in three within a year, more than one in two within five. A fall after a hip fracture is not a remote possibility, and the person most likely to be on the floor is the one who lives alone, often for the first time, because the fracture came after a spouse died or a move. How common living alone is at each age is on our page on how many Canadian seniors live alone.
Three things follow from that, and none of them is medical.
The first is getting up. After hip surgery, getting up from the floor unaided may not be possible for a long time, and the right way to help is not obvious. We have written separately about lift assistance for seniors in Canada, including when to call for help rather than lift.
The second is time. The harm in a fall is often not the fall but the hours on the floor before anyone knows, which is the subject of our page on the long lie after a fall. For a person recovering from a hip fracture, those hours are the thing to design out of the household.
The third is where we come in, stated plainly. No device prevents a fall. What a monitored medical alert does is shorten the time between a fall and a person knowing about it. With our Home Freedom system, a base unit sits in the home and a lightweight help button is worn as a pendant or on the wrist, including in the bathroom where the provincial guides put so much of their attention. A press reaches an operator at a monitoring centre in Canada, around the clock, who works from a response plan the family wrote down: who to call and in what order, who holds a key, and which medications a paramedic should know about. Fall detection is available as an option on some of our pendants; it senses patterns of movement and impact and can place a call without the button being pressed, and it is a backup to the button rather than a replacement, because no sensor on the market catches every fall.
Plans typically run month to month after a three-month minimum at the start, with optional six or twelve month initial terms if the savings suit you. Service reverts to month to month afterwards, and there are no cancellation fees. The equipment is included with the subscription and Easy Setup means it is working within minutes of arriving, which matters when the person it is for came home yesterday.
Setting up a parent’s home for the months after a hip fracture? The Home Freedom system puts an operator in Canada on the other end of a worn help button, day and night, working from the response plan your family sets. Equipment included, Easy Setup, no long-term contract. Call 1-888-755-3055 and we will help you set it up before the discharge date.
Each was read on 1 October 2026. None of these organizations is affiliated with Bedford or reviewed this page. This page is general information, not medical advice; the person’s own care team governs.
