Do physical activity interventions help to reduce social care services use and associated costs in community-based older adults?
What are we trying to do?
The aim of this work is to examine the evidence and determine whether physical activity, physical function/ fitness or sedentary behaviour interventions can help to reduce social care service use and costs in community based older adults aged 50+ years.
Why is this important?
Health care is defined as provision of services to maintain and improve people's health, including preventing, diagnosing, and treating diseases, illnesses, and injuries. The NHS (National Health Service) is a publicly funded system offering free-at-point-of-delivery healthcare to UK residents. Social care, in the UK, is defined as the provision of personal and practical care and support that people (and their carers) may need because of their age, illness, cognition, disability, or other circumstances. The aim is to help people retain their dignity, remain independent, and achieve a better quality of life. Unlike NHS services that are free at point of need, social care is means-tested in the UK.
As people age, they are at a higher risk of developing multiple comorbidities and disabilities, and as a result tend to use more health and social care services in later life. Factors such as an ageing population can lead to increased service demands and higher service costs. Therefore, as the care system burden builds, significant inequalities in mortality rates, health, and socioeconomic influences persist and add to the unequal outcomes for people as they age.
Embracing lifestyle changes such as increasing physical activity have been shown to reduce multimorbidity risk, maintain function and independence, decrease the need for hospitalisation/ institutionalisation, improve wellbeing and other significant socioeconomic benefits to service users, service providers, healthcare systems and society overall. To date there have been no reviews systematically examining the impact of physical activity interventions on social care use and/ or costs in the UK.
How are we doing it?
Previous reviews on physical activity interventions for older adults have focused on the effectiveness of different components or implementation strategies to improve health-related outcomes for specific patient groups or the general older adult population. However, to date there have been no reviews systematically examining the impact of physical activity interventions on social care use and/ or costs. In this review, we are systematically reviewing the evidence on whether physical activity interventions aimed at community-based older adults aged 50+ years, are effective in helping to reduce social care service use and costs.
Full details of the review can be found in the protocol registered on PROSPERO (CRD42024582499).
Who are we working with?
Contact Information
Programme Manager
Alison Littlewood
alison.j.littlewood@manchester.ac.uk