Making multicomponent frailty programs sustainable: understanding costs, barries and enablers to scale up and adoption

Principal Advisor: Dr Natasha Reid

Organisational unit: Centre for Health Services Research

Frailty is the most significant challenge to “ageing well” in Australia. Older people with mild frailty (becoming ‘slow’ and losing muscle strength) are at significantly increased risk of becoming severely frail (with loss of independence and need for nursing home care). Evidence is mixed on the effectiveness of interventions delivered in the community, although exercise and nutritional support interventions garner the most promise within the literature.

Our team has a large scale MRFF project to develop and test two different intervention models combining exercise, nutrition, medication management and social engagement in a novel combination of pillars to support frailty prevention and management (the FITTEST trial). Participants for this trial will be recruited from geriatric medicine clinics around Australia.

The successful PhD candidate will form part of our team at the Centre for Health Services Research at UQ, and will drive the program of work to understand how to enable the sustainability of this program past the MRFF funding. This will include conducting stakeholder interviews to understand barriers and enablers, implementing sub-studies and running secondary analyses, and understanding the behavioural factors that lead to success within the program.