A walk round the house for hazards you can point at
A home hazard walkthrough only works if it sticks to one rule: look at the building, not at the person living in it.
A rug that slides is a fact. You can see it, point at it, and put a hand on it to check. How likely somebody is to fall is a clinical judgement, and getting that wrong in the reassuring direction is how people get hurt. That question belongs with a doctor, nurse or physiotherapist, who can do it properly. Everything below is about the house.
Walk it in order, room by room
Doing it as a wander produces a list of whatever caught your eye in the kitchen. Doing it as a route produces a list. Nine stops covers a normal home: the entrance and steps, hallways and walkways, the stairs, the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom and the night-time route, outdoor paths, and lighting throughout.
In each one, look for the things that are visible and specific: a rug with a curled edge, a cable crossing a doorway, a handrail on one side of the stairs only, boxes stored on the stairs, a bath mat that slides, a bulb that has been out for a month, a step with no contrast on its edge.
Mark three states, not two
Found, checked-and-clear, or not applicable — and anything you did not look at stays unmarked and is counted separately. An unchecked item is not a safe item; it is one nobody has looked at yet. Collapsing those two into "fine" is how a walkthrough quietly turns into a reassurance exercise.
Order by place plus ease
Two small numbers, both of which you can argue with, are enough to order the whole list.
PLACE is about how much damage the same hazard does where it is. Stairs and bathrooms score 3: a fall on the stairs is a fall through a height, and a bathroom is hard edges, water and nothing soft to land on. Entrances, outdoor paths, the night-time route and lighting score 2 — the night route because it gets walked in the dark, half awake. Everywhere else scores 1, which does not mean safe; it means the same hazard does less damage there.
EASE is about excuses. 3 is free and immediate, 2 is free but an afternoon's work, 1 needs buying. A high EASE does not mean the hazard matters more — it means there is less reason not to have done it.
Add them for a priority, then split the list by EASE before you sort by priority. Everything free comes before everything that has to be bought.
Why free jobs go first even when they score lower
Take two items. A cable across the living room floor: PLACE 1, EASE 3, priority 4. A grab rail beside the bath: PLACE 3, EASE 1, priority 4. Identical priority.
The cable still goes first, because it takes forty seconds and the grab rail is going to get quoted for next month. A rail that somebody is thinking about protects nobody this week. The free list is the one that actually gets done, and it is usually finished by teatime.
Both numbers get printed beside every line precisely so you can overrule this. If you know the loose mat in your own house matters more than the arithmetic says, do that one first. It is arithmetic, not a verdict.
The one job worth paying for
A grab rail is only a grab rail if it goes into something solid — a stud, a timber noggin, or hollow-wall fixings rated for the load — and it has to be tested with full body weight before anybody trusts it. A rail that pulls out of plasterboard is worse than no rail at all, because somebody is hanging off it, wet. If there is any doubt, pay somebody who fits them for a living.
The checklist
The Home Fall-Hazard Walkthrough runs the route, takes what you found, and prints the prioritised fix list with both numbers on every line, the free jobs separated out, and the unchecked items counted honestly. The rubric is printed in full so the next reader can disagree with it.
Print it and hand it to whoever can act: a family member, a landlord, an occupational therapist, a physiotherapist. There is no score in it and no rating of anybody, deliberately.