COVID-19 and Social Isolation and Loneliness Trial (SIL)

Mount Sinai Hospital, Canada

Status: Unknown

Conditions: Geriatric; Loneliness; Social Isolation

Treatments: Other: HOW R U? Intervention

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05228782

21-0074E

Details and patient eligibility

About

Social isolation and loneliness worsen older peoples' quality of life, risk of dementia, and contributes to 45,000 deaths/year in Canada - as much as smoking. Isolated people use the health care system more often, but have worse outcomes. Effective, inexpensive interventions exist but unfortunately they have not been implemented in Canada.

We partnered with the Australian developer of HOW R U?, an effective and feasible intervention that uses specially trained, older, hospital volunteers to provide peer support to combat isolation and loneliness in isolated older peers.

Little is known about older people's preferences for virtual care (telephone vs. video) nor their relative effectiveness. Thus we will compare two ways of delivering HOW R U: telephone support and a tested, secure user-friendly video conferencing app, aTouch Away® to a common control arm.

We also partnered with Emergency Medicine, Family Medicine, Geriatrics and Psychiatry to identify people who will benefit from peer support; and with Volunteer Services to recruit volunteers.

Enrollment: 141 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 70+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Any community-dwelling person 70 years of age and older receiving care from the ED, Family Medicine, or Geriatric clinics at our two participating sites (MSH and NYGH) will be eligible.

Exclusion criteria

• age less than 70 years; communication problems (critically ill, unconscious, language barrier, speech impairment or otherwise unable to provide consent), or admission to a hospital for > 72 hours. Patients with severe cognitive impairment or those living in nursing homes who are dependent on others for their activity of daily living will be excluded. To target the intervention for older people with loneliness a baseline de Jonge loneliness scores of 2.0 will be required for participation in the trial.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Supportive Care

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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141 participants in 3 patient groups

HOW RU Intervention delivered by telephone

Experimental group

Description:

Group Phone will receive the HOW RU? intervention over the telephone.

Treatment:

Other: HOW R U? Intervention

HOW RU Intervention delivered by video-call

Experimental group

Description:

Group Video will receive the HOW RU? intervention delivered over video-call using the aTouch Away platform.

Treatment:

Other: HOW R U? Intervention

Wait-list Control Group

No Intervention group

Description:

Control groups will be offered standard care through their referring service (i.e. their routine clinical follow-up). The control group will be offered HOW RU? telephone support outside of the main trial after their primary outcome assessment at 12 weeks