Connecting With Older Adults By Phone May Reduce Loneliness, Depression, Anxiety During Pandemic

Older adults who received regular phone calls from a young adult a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic experienced greater improvements in loneliness, depression, and anxiety after four weeks compared with older adults who did not receive these calls. Thefindings were published today in JAMA Psychiatry.“The use of lay callers, deliberate but brief approach on training, and the use of ubiquitous telephones made the approach easily deployable and scalable,” wrote Maninder K. Kahlon, Ph.D., of the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues.The study included 240 participants aged 27 to 101 who were homebound, had at least one chronic condition, and were receiving services for food through Meals on Wheels Central Texas. More than 60% of the participants were at least 65 years, 56% were living alone, 79% were women, 39% identified as Black or African American, and 22% identified as Hispanic or Latino. The participants were randomly assigned to receive phone calls from the same volunteer for a four-week period (intervention group) or no calls until after the four-week follow-up (control group).The volunteers, aged 17 to 23, attended one hour of training by videoconference on how to engage participants in conversation on topics of their choice and were asked to watch less than one hour of videotaped instructions on the program. For the first five days of the program, the volunteers called all participants every day at the time they requested. After the first week, the partic...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: anxiety COVID-19 depression GAD-7 JAMA Psychiatry loneliness pandemic PHQ-8 telephone calls UCLA Loneliness scale Source Type: research