Yes / Loneliness in older people is associated with poor health-related quality of life (HRQoL). We
undertook a parallel-group randomised controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of
telephone befriending for the maintenance of HRQoL in older people. An internal pilot tested the feasibility
of the trial and intervention.
Methods: Participants aged >74 years, with good cognitive function, living independently in one UK city were
recruited through general practices and other sources, then randomised to: (1) 6 weeks of short one-to-one
telephone calls, followed by 12 weeks of group telephone calls with up to six participants, led by a trained
volunteer facilitator; or (2) a control group. The main trial required the recruitment of 248 participants in a 1-year
accrual window, of whom 124 were to receive telephone befriending. The pilot specified three success criteria
which had to be met in order to progress the main trial to completion: recruitment of 68 participants in 95 days;
retention of 80% participants at 6 months; successful delivery of telephone befriending by local franchise of national
charity. The primary clinical outcome was the Short Form (36) Health Instrument (SF-36) Mental Health (MH)
dimension score collected by telephone 6 months following randomisation.
Results: We informed 9,579 older people about the study. Seventy consenting participants were randomised to
the pilot in 95 days, with 56 (80%) providing valid primary outcome data (26 intervention, 30 control). Twenty-four
participants randomly allocated to the research arm actually received telephone befriending due to poor recruitment
and retention of volunteer facilitators. The trial was closed early as a result. The mean 6-month SF-36 MH scores were
78 (SD 18) and 71 (SD 21) for the intervention and control groups, respectively (mean difference, 7; 95% CI, −3 to 16).
Conclusions: Recruitment and retention of participants to a definitive trial with a recruitment window of 1 year
is feasible. For the voluntary sector to recruit sufficient volunteers to match demand for telephone befriending created
by trial recruitment would require the study to be run in more than one major population centre, and/or involve
dedicated management of volunteers.
Trial registration: ISRCTN28645428.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/10990 |
| Date | 28 March 2014 |
| Creators | Mountain, Gail, Hind, D., Gossage-Worrall, R., Walters, S.J., Duncan, R., Newbould, L., Rex, S., Jones, C., Bowling, A., Cattan, M., Cairns, A., Cooper, C., Tudor Edwards, R., Goyder, E.C. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Published version |
| Rights | © 2014 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), CC-BY |
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