Grant: Team Grant: HCIS - LOI - Healthy aging

Canadians are living longer but many have reduced quality of life and trouble with day-to-day activities, and often develop frailty. Older adults with frailty are vulnerable to catastrophic decreases in their health from minor stressors, which can lead to hospitalization or death. There is increasing evidence that aging can be positively altered such that frailty and disease is delayed or prevented. Many of the causes of frailty are preventable, including muscle loss, poor nutrition, and loneliness. Our research focuses on implementing a city-wide, population-based healthy-aging strategy called AVOID Frailty. AVOID Frailty promotes regular Activity and exercise, adult Vaccinations, Optimization of medications, regular social Interaction, and improved Diet and nutrition. AVOID Frailty proposes behaviour-change methods to educate, encourage and help people adopt and maintain these behaviours over time. Our project will identify the community barriers and facilitators that are responsible for people's adoption of AVOID Frailty behaviours in cities like Kingston and Trois-Rivières. Our plan is to first identify all community care and social programs available to community members to maintain their health and include them in the AVOID Frailty strategy. We will then consult older adults and city representatives and from community organizations to study how AVOID Frailty can be further tailored to the needs of older adults who live in various types of residences. In a last step, we will assess the extent to which adoption of the AVOID Frailty behaviours improves the well-being and quality of life of older adults. Our findings will allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of this tailoring strategy in meeting older adults' needs, and implement it in other Canadian cities so that older adults can live longer in good health and with high quality of life.