Community volunteers' involvement shows promise for decreasing health care use by older adults

Including community volunteers into health care system has shown promise in decreasing health care usage by older adults and also in shifting care from hospitals to primary care, a recent study has found.

The study was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

"We found that older adults who took part in the Health TAPESTRY program changed the way in which they used health care services," said lead author Dr Lisa Dolovich.

"Encouragingly, participants had more visits to primary care with fewer (emergency department) and hospital admissions compared to those, not in the program," she added.

The Health TAPESTRY (Health Teams Advancing Patient Experience: Strengthening Quality) project combines new elements, such as using trained volunteers and electronic software, with the current health system, to support optimal ageing in adults aged 70 years or older.

While results from the randomised controlled trial did not affect the primary goal of the study, which was to help older adults to reach their health goals, there were other positive effects between the intervention and control groups.

For example, there was an increase of 81 minutes of weekly walking time in the intervention group compared with a 120-minute decrease in the control group, and the intervention group reported higher overall levels of physical activity. The volunteers gave primary health care teams information that the health providers might not have otherwise known.

"These findings suggest that Health TAPESTRY has the potential to improve the way primary care is delivered in Canada by shifting care of individuals away from hospitals to the community and to a more proactive and preventative team-based model of care," said co-author Dr David Price.

In a related commentary, Dr Susan Smith, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland wrote, "The results of this study suggest that the Health TAPESTRY intervention may contribute to improvements in patient care for older, community-dwelling adults. Further exploration of this model of care is warranted given the challenge for all health systems in shifting from single-condition care pathways to approaches that seek to address multimorbidity.