TBM (Applied Biomedical Research with a Primary Societal finality) project : Tackling FRAILTY: ACTIVE-AGE@home: a home-based functional exercise program for community dwelling frail older adults (FWOTBM9)

This study is perfectly aligned with the current health policy plan of
Flanders, emphasising vulnerable people in the community, involving
family and volunteers while focussing on health promotion to counter
sedentary lifestyle.Despite the high level of evidence for physical activity
(PA) as a countermeasure for frailty, the current Flemish standard of care
does not include structural PA interventions for community-dwelling frail
older adults. One barrier for this, is the high cost of supervised PA
programmes. This was reported by representatives of different policy
making bodies in our advisory board during the development of the
present proposal. Therefore, in this pragmatic randomised controlled
trial, we will consider the Flemish current standard of care for frail older
adults as a control group. Intervention arm 1 reflects the state-of-the-art
treatment (provided by professionals) and intervention arm 2 (provided
by volunteers) aims to provide an answer to the financial burden of arm
1. The pretrajectory of this study was based on the ‘British Medical
Research Council guidance’ for the development and evaluation of
complex interventions. This resulted in a comprehensive, state-of-the art
personalised PA programme for community-dwelling frail older
adults:ACTIVE-AGE@home. The programme adheres to current
guidelines for PA and exercise for frail older adults and considers lowthreshold
and meaningful activities for the participants. The latter
perfectly aligns with the complex bio-psychosocial components of frailty.
We are now ready to take the next step: we will test its effect on
functional ability and evaluate its cost-effectiveness when it is
administered by professionals or by trained volunteers and compare this
to the care as usual in Flanders.
Positive results will help frail older adults but also reduce health and
social expenditures and alligns with a 'prevention and health promotion'
model instead of an acute care model as it is currently..

Keywords:Elderly care

Disciplines:Health promotion and policy

Project type:Collaboration project