Long-term care in motion

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Introduction

This project set out to investigate social innovations for the enhancement of quality of life and wellbeing, especially the healthy life expectancy—for older people. The project acted on the assumption that despite strong evidence for activity promotion in elderly people in institutional settings, increased and diversified activity was currently only implemented at a rudimentary level.

Therefore, the primary objective of this sub-project was to increase and systematically promote the implementation and understanding regarding various aspects of activity patterns, physical fitness, and social participation of nursing home residents; staff members and environmental setting were also addressed. Instead of a rigorous design, however – such as a randomised, control-trial intervention study – we pursued an innovative, partially controlled pilot project accounting for content and methodology.

Findings

The first deliverable was a guidebook which described the intervention components used in the interdisciplinary research project 'Long-term care in motion' as part of the Innovage consortium. The intervention program was meant as a social innovation in the nursing home setting and enabled professionals working in this context to enhance the physical activity of residents. The guidebook was fully revised in the last quarter of 2015 and the new version is available.

Download the guidebook (PDF, 1.6MB)

The second deliverable was a paper in BMC Geriatrics – Assessing the effect of a physical activity intervention in a nursing home ecology: A natural lab approach authored by Carl-Philipp Jansen, Katrin Claßen, Klaus Hauer, Mona Diegelmann and Hans-Werner Wahl from Heidelberg University in Germany.

Read the paper online

Published in May 2015, the third paper was one of our project milestones. Published in the European Journal of Ageing, this was a review synthesising the existing evidence on interventions in long-term care institutions and critically reviewing their assessment methods.

The formal citation is: Jansen, C. P., Claßen, K., Wahl, H. W. and Hauer, K. (2015) Effects of interventions on physical activity in nursing home residents. European Journal of Ageing. Published online. DOI 10.1007/s10433-015-0344-1

Read the third paper

Annual updates and reports

• 2013 (PDF, 13KB)

• 2014 (PDF, 22KB)

• 2015 (PDF, 559KB)

• Summary of findings (PDF, 59KB)

Regular progress updates

See the presentations from the Innovage Forums:

• Forum 1: 25 September 2013 (PDF, 846KB)

• Forum 2: 25 September 2014 (PDF, 463KB)

• Forum 3: 19 May 2015 (PDF, 280KB)

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