Community Paramedicine at Home (CP@Home)

McMaster University

Status: Completed

Conditions: Diabetes Mellitus; Food Insecurity; Accidental Falls; Social Isolation; Cardiovascular Disease

Treatments: Other: CP@Home

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT02835989

2153

Details and patient eligibility

About

Community Paramedicine @Home (CP@Home) is a novel community paramedicine health assessment program for high users of Emergency Medical Services (EMS). Individuals who have been identified as active callers to EMS, individuals who have called EMS for lift-assists, and direct paramedic referrals are referred into the community paramedicine home visit program. The program will focus on in-home chronic disease management, community health service connections, and EMS usage education. Aside from chronic disease management, aspects of the program include health-related quality of life, social isolation and other social determinants of health. Participants in the program will have up to 3 one-on-one home visits from a community paramedic to ultimately reduce repeat EMS calls and improve their overall health.

Enrollment: 2,826 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• 3 or more EMS calls in the last 6 months from intervention start date AND active caller in the last 30 days OR
• Any call for a lift assist to EMS in the past 30 days OR
• Paramedic referral into program (identified by paramedic through usual practice)

Exclusion criteria

• Individuals living in long term care facilities
• Individuals currently involved in a home visit or social navigator program

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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2,826 participants in 2 patient groups

CP@Home Intervention

Experimental group

Description:

The experimental group will receive the CP@Home program. The main elements of this program include BP assessment, diabetes risk assessment, falls risk assessment, heart failure risk assessment, neurologic assessment, psychiatric assessment, depression screening, health-related quality of life analysis (including pain, mobility, anxiety/depression, ADLs), social isolation screening, and food and income security. The program is targeted at referrals to appropriate community resources, identification and referral of high-risk patients to their family physician (FP), as well as regular communication of participants' health information to their physician. The intervention will be implemented by community paramedics from the local paramedic service who have undergone a structured training program (4 hours of online, interactive training modules, including case studies and the observation of an intervention visits led by another paramedic) to assure intervention fidelity.

Treatment:

Other: CP@Home

Control

No Intervention group

Description:

Usual Care