Evaluation of a community paramedicine health promotion and lifestyle risk assessment program for older adults who live in social housing: a cluster randomized trial.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Low-income older adults who live in subsidized housing have higher mortality and morbidity. We aimed to determine if a community paramedicine program - in which paramedics provide health care services outside of the traditional emergency response - reduced the number of ambulance calls to subsidized housing for older adults.

Methods

We conducted an open-label pragmatic cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) with parallel intervention and control groups in subsidized apartment buildings for older adults. We selected 6 buildings using predefined criteria, which we then randomly assigned to intervention (Community Paramedicine at Clinic [CP@clinic] for 1 yr) or control (usual health care) using computer-generated paired randomization. CP@clinic is a paramedic-led,

SUBMITTER: Agarwal G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5973885 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature