Decision Process About the Location of Care Among Frail Elderly Clinical Trial
Official title:
Improving the Decision Making Process About Location of Care With the Frail Elderly and Their Caregivers
One of the toughest decisions faced by the frail elderly in Canada is whether to stay at
home or move to a care facility. It is certainly difficult to make this decision alone, but
can be even harder if someone else makes it for you. Shared decision making is when, instead
of making decisions for the patient, healthcare professionals share information about what
the evidence says, and they talk about what's important with the patient, and then make the
decision together. In the case of the frail elderly in home care services, there are many
health care professionals involved, e.g. the doctor, nurse and social worker. In this case
decisions should be shared by all the professionals involved with the elderly person along
with his or her caregivers. Unfortunately, in this context, shared decision making rarely
occurs.
We have designed a training program that teaches interprofessional teams how to share
decisions with their frail elderly patients, and tested it in one Quebec City and one
Edmonton home care team. This project tests the training program on a broader scale with 16
home care teams attached to community health centres across the province of Quebec, and will
compare the results with what happens when no one has completed the training (usual care).
Home care is a rapidly growing sector and this study will lay the foundations for a national
strategy to ensure that no one has to make this difficult decision alone.
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Allocation: Randomized, Endpoint Classification: Efficacy Study, Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment, Masking: Single Blind (Subject), Primary Purpose: Health Services Research