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Abstract
Introduction The challenges of global ageing and the growing burden of chronic diseases require innovative interventions acting on health determinants like social participation. Many older adults do not have equitable opportunities to achieve full social participation, and interventions might underempower their personal and environmental resources and only reach a minority. To optimise current practices, the Accompagnement-citoyen Personnalisé d’Intégration Communautaire (APIC), an intervention demonstrated as being feasible and having positive impacts, needs further evaluation.
Methods and analysis A pragmatic multicentre, prospective, two-armed, randomised controlled trial will evaluate: (1) the short-term and long-term effects of the APIC on older adults’ health, social participation, life satisfaction and healthcare services utilisation and (2) its cost-effectiveness. A total of 376 participants restricted in at least one instrumental activity of daily living and living in three large cities in the province of Quebec, Canada, will be randomly assigned to the experimental or control group using a centralised computer-generated random number sequence procedure. The experimental group will receive weekly 3-hour personalised stimulation sessions given by a trained volunteer over the first 12 months. Sessions will encourage empowerment, gradual mobilisation of personal and environmental resources and community integration. The control group will receive the publicly funded universal healthcare services available to all Quebecers. Over 2 years (baseline and 12, 18 and 24 months later), self-administered questionnaires will assess physical and mental health (primary outcome; version 2 of the 36-item Short-Form Health Survey, converted to SF-6D utility scores for quality-adjusted life years), social participation (Social Participation Scale) and life satisfaction (Life Satisfaction Index-Z). Healthcare services utilisation will be recorded and costs of each intervention calculated.
Ethics and dissemination The Research Ethics Committee of the CIUSSS Estrie – CHUS has approved the study (MP-31-2018-2424). An informed consent form will be read and signed by all study participants. Findings will be published and presented at conferences.
Trial registration number NCT03161860; Pre-results.
- intervention evaluation
- cost-effectiveness
- community participation
- social integration
- social activity
- empowerment
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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Footnotes
Contributors ML prepared the first draft of this manuscript with the assistance of JL-B. All coauthors (M-FD, JF, H-MV, AT, M-JL, CG, HL, VB and CE) revised the manuscript and approved the final version.
Funding This work was supported by a Foundation Grant (#148466) from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and its publication by the Social Inequalities and Equity Strategic Grouping of the Quebec Population Health Research Network. ML is a Junior 1 Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (FRSQ) Researcher (salary award #26815, 2013-2017) and a CIHR New Investigator (salary award #360880, 2017-2022).
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent Not required.
Ethics approval This study has been approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS (MP-31-2018-2424). The Committee will be notified of all substantial modifications to the protocol.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement Data will be available upon request to corresponding author.