Grant: CIHR Fellowship

More than 300,000 older people in Canada have major surgery yearly. Their top goal is getting home as soon as is safely possible. Many of these older people live with a condition called 'frailty', which means that they have problems in many aspects of their health. Having frailty before surgery means more than twice the risk of having bad outcomes after surgery (dying, having a heart or lung problem). Having frailty also means a 5-times increased risk of not going home. This is exactly what patients don't want. We know that older people with frailty are some of the highest risk patients who have surgery, but research shows that we haven't come up with good ways to make their outcomes better. Even worse, people with frailty are usually left out of research aimed at developing new ways to improve outcomes. Our team works with older people with frailty who have experience undergoing surgery to understand what we need to do to help them get the better outcomes that they need: 1) enough support to function at home; 2) a link to be able to communicate with the hospital; 3) the knowledge and resources to feel empowered that they can recover. Understanding these needs, we worked together with patients, clinicians, and health leaders to find a promising solution called 'Virtual Recovery'. Virtual Recovery means patients go home with simple technology that tracks their vital signs and healing, lets nurses and doctors check on patients daily at home, and identifies problems in recovery early so they can be dealt with. While Virtual Recovery is promising, it hasn't been tested for people with frailty to see if it works. Before testing whether Virtual Recovery can increase the number of days alive at home after surgery (which is important to patients), we will conduct a pilot study to see if patients are willing to consent to participate in this type of study, if the intervention can be easily implemented, and if follow-up data can be adequately captured.