Connecting Emergency Departments With Community Services to Prevent Mobility Losses in Pre-frail & Frail Seniors (CEDeComS)

Yearly, around 400 000 Canadian community-dwelling seniors sustain injuries that are not life threatening but limit their mobility and normal activities. Up to 65 % of these seniors seek care in Emergency Departments (EDs) and 2/3 are discharged from EDs with varying degrees of minor injuries. Since 2010 and using multicenter large Canadian cohorts (n=3000), our CIHR CETI* emerging team has shown that minor injuries trigger a downward spiral of mobility decline in 16% of seniors who are still independent at the time of injury, unmasking early impairments and a prefrail or frail status. As there are no ED management guidelines designed to prevent these prefrail (35%) and frail (13%) injured seniors from losing their mobility and function, they do deteriorate within 6 months post-ED discharge. This is unfortunate because there is compelling evidence of the effectiveness of community and home-based mobility interventions showing that simple, targeted interventions can prevent frailty and functional limitations.

In that context, identification of seniors at risk in EDs is crucial to implement effective interventions. The CETI has validated a simple Clinical Decision Rule (CETI-CDR) that screens and orients seniors at high, moderate and low risk of functional decline to appropriate post-ED follow-ups. The latter include effective community-based mobility interventions available across all Canadian communities. An ongoing pilot study (n=120) in two EDs is showing the feasibility and effectiveness (functional decline prevention) of interventions and patient satisfaction. The investigators thus propose to implement the CEDeComS intervention, which involves the CETI-CDR combined with rapid linkage to community mobility programs directly from EDs.

The Main Objectives of this study are to 1) evaluate the effectiveness of the CEDeComS compared to usual care, on improving seniors' health outcomes, 2) determine the cost-effectiveness of the intervention.