Falls, choking and suicide were the main causes of preventable deaths, according to a new study by Monash University researcher Joe Ibrahim, in a trend he says shows we are "not looking hard enough" for ways to reduce the risks for elderly Australians.

Sarah Russell's mother, Joan, died in a nursing home in September 2015. She believes the death was premature.

"When my mother was engaged, she was terrific. When she was alone and not engaged, she'd suffer anxiety ... [and] she would get up and walk," Dr Russell, a public health researcher, said.

Dr Russell gave up work to look after her, but she could not be there at all times, so she attached a note to her mother's walking frame to warn the personal care assistants at the aged care facility not to leave her walker within reach.

One day, in the dining room after lunch, they did.

"She got up and walked, fell over. She didn't break her hip, but she did damage her ribs, and six weeks later she was dead. The GP made the connection between the fall and her decline ... I think the fall hastened her death."

Dr Russell said the care assistants in Joan Russell's home were "extremely busy", but "the other explanation is that there were a lot of people in Mum's nursing home for whom English was not their first language.

"It's a real problem, not just for instructions left on a walker, but for communication at all. I don't know if the person who left the trolley beside my mother was not able to read the instructions or was too busy and forgot.

"We were great friends, my mother and I ... It mattered a lot to me that she had the fall."

Dr Russell received an apology from the facility.

Professor Ibrahim, who studied Coroner's Court records of more than 23,000 cases of deaths in aged care, palliative care or residential care between 2000 and 2013, wrote that preventable deaths had quadrupled from 1.2 per 1000 admissions to 5.3 per 1000.

Falls caused 82 per cent of those deaths, followed by choking at 8 per cent and suicide at 4.5 per cent.

His article, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, argues that a national policy framework, including an authority to improve nursing home practices, is needed to reduce the number of premature deaths.

"Would you give up a day, a week, a month of your life because of someone else's action? If you are 90, you might have a year left in you. Do you want to spend that time, or do you want someone else to cash it in for you?" Professor Ibrahim told Fairfax Media.

His study had met stiff resistance from some academic colleagues, who suggested he was wasting his time on the elderly.

"Anonymous reviewers and journals use words like 'misguided'," Professor Ibrahim said. "They say, 'Old people are going to die anyway, so there's no such thing as a preventable death' ... or, 'The subject matter isn't of sufficient interest to be published'."

Dr Russell's mother's death prompted her to get involved in aged care advocacy.

"As a public health researcher sitting in an aged care home for several years, I saw a lot of systemic problems in aged care that I felt needed fixing," she said.

Nursing homes in Australia are increasingly run for profit by large, often listed companies, and large, well-off not-for profit organisations, and are regulated by a number of government bodies. However, "No one entity is responsible for reducing harm by improving practice", Professor Ibrahim's study noted.

He acknowledged that deaths reported to the coroner were a blunt and unsatisfactory instrument for measuring harm, and differences in reporting regimes between states made it difficult to draw firm conclusions on increases. Better figures were unavailable because they were "locked up in the corporate environment".

Sean Rooney, the head of the aged care provider organisation Leading Age Services Australia, said Professor Ibrahim's study offered "some interesting insights".

"As an industry we actively seek to continuously maintain and improve high standards of care."

However: "A good quality of life requires a certain degree of autonomy so residents may make choices that enhance their quality of life, choices that may also increase the risk of potential harm."

Australia has 235,000 residents of aged care homes, of whom 83 per cent are classified as requiring high care, including dementia care.

A spokeswoman for the federal Health Department said an independent review of aged care regulations was announced earlier this month after revelations about poor practice in South Australia's Oakden Older Persons Mental Health Service.