COVID-19 and Social Isolation and Loneliness Trial

Overview

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.

Conditions