A qualitative exploration of challenges recruiting older adults for Being Your Best, a co-designed holistic intervention to manage and reduce frailty: lessons learnt amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne, Australia

Saleem, Ahsan; Appannah, Arti; Meyer, Claudia; Hutchinson, Alison M; Mills, Amber; Smit, De Villiers; Boyd, Leanne; Rose, Michael; Sutherland, Fran; O'Keefe, Fleur; Lowthian, Judy A

doi:10.26181/26762068.v1

A qualitative exploration of challenges recruiting older adults for Being Your Best, a co-designed holistic intervention to manage and reduce frailty: lessons learnt amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne, Australia

journal contribution

posted on 2024-08-16, 04:27 authored by Ahsan Saleem, Arti Appannah, Claudia Meyer, Alison M Hutchinson, Amber Mills, De Villiers Smit, Leanne BoydLeanne Boyd, Michael Rose, Fran Sutherland, Fleur O'Keefe, Judy A Lowthian

Objectives: Researchers face numerous challenges when recruiting participants for health and social care research. This study reports on the challenges faced recruiting older adults for Being Your Best, a co-designed holistic intervention to manage and reduce frailty, and highlights lessons learnt amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Design: A qualitative study design was used. Referrer interviews were conducted to explore the recruitment challenges faced by the frontline workers. An audit of the research participant (aged ≥65) database was also undertaken to evaluate the reasons for refusal to participate and withdrawal from the study. Setting: Hospital emergency departments (EDs) and a home care provider in Melbourne, Australia. Participants: Frontline workers and older adults. Results: From May 2022 to June 2023, 71 referrals were received. Of those referrals, only 13 (18.3%) agreed to participate. Three participants withdrew immediately after baseline data collection, and the remaining 10 continued to participate in the programme. Reasons for older adult non-participation were (1) health issues (25.3%), (2) ineligibility (18.3%), (3) lack of interest (15.5%), (4) perceptions of being 'too old' (11.2%) and (5) perceptions of being too busy (5.6%). Of those participating, five were female and five were male. Eleven referrer interviews were conducted to explore challenges with recruitment, and three themes were generated after thematic analysis: (1) challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, (2) characteristics of the programme and (3) health of older adults. Conclusion: Despite using multiple strategies, recruitment was much lower than anticipated. The ED staff were at capacity associated with pandemic-related activities. While EDs are important sources of participants for research, they were not suitable recruitment sites at the time of this study, due to COVID-19-related challenges. Programme screening characteristics and researchers' inability to develop rapport with potential participants also contributed to low recruitment numbers.

History

Publication Date

2024-05-23

Journal

BMJ Open

Volume

14

Issue

5

Article Number

e082618

Pagination

9p.

Publisher

BMJ

ISSN

2044-6055

Rights Statement

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2024. Published by BMJ. This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.