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“ The ASPREE study has been designed specifically to look at not only heart attacks and strokes and those major chronic disease outcomes but also at the impact of aspirin treatment on the prevention of cognitive decline and vascular dementia.”
The team will look at how well participants are able to perform cognitive function testing.
“ When you’ re healthy, it does take time to develop the chronic diseases, and we’ re particularly interested to see whether aspirin therapy over a longer-term treatment period of around five years can delay the onset of those diseases.
“ There is some evidence from some previous trials to suggest that, particularly in cancer prevention, it may take a bit of time for the treatment to have an effect on reducing the likelihood of cancers occurring.
“ We’ re [ also ] going to be following any evidence of hospital admissions for cardiovascular events or for cancers. We’ ll be ensuring that we’ re able to detail very accurately how these participants are functioning in the communication over that fiveyear period.
“ We think this five-year period is long enough for us to be able to collect the number of events that are required, but then also to be sure if we do see differences [ they ] are not due to chance and that there would be a real effect that we’ re able to report on.
“ What we’ re hoping is that we’ ll continue to monitor people in the long term.”
Reid says the team have been“ delighted by the response” from many elderly Australians all over the nation.
“ Aspirin is a medication that’ s been around for many years,” he says.“ A lot of people are familiar, obviously, with aspirin and its potential effects. Australia has contributed more than 16,500 participants to this 19,000-patient study.”
BETTER LEADERSHIP, BETTER AGED CARE The University of Sydney’ s professor Yun-Hee Jeon’ s interest in leadership and management in aged care has led her to conduct Australia’ s first study on the topic.
Based in the university’ s faculty of nursing, Jeon says despite no shortage of leadership and management courses in health and aged care,“ there’ s a lack of solid evidence for the effectiveness of the leadership program in the aged-care sector”.
“ The relationship between good leadership and workforce retention has long been a topic of healthcare literature and in fact the issue is not just limited to the healthcare sector,” Jeon says.“ Managers in aged care play a pivotal role in shaping a positive culture by setting and improving the standards of care for the health and wellbeing of aged-care clients and by supporting and leading staff so that together they can achieve maximum outcomes for their clients.”
Jeon led the innovative research that evaluated the Clinical Leadership in Aged Care( CliAC) program, which was aimed at developing leadership capacity. The team examined the effectiveness of CLiAC against three main areas: work environment; quality and safety of patient care; and staff turnover rates.
“[ We have found that ] leadership and management skills in agedcare managers can be nurtured and used to change leadership behaviours and outcomes. This is not new but it is the first time we have made this link from the perspective of staff using a rigorous method and proved that such improvements can be made at a reasonable cost. The findings also emphasised the critical component to success – the organisation’ s strategic support in improving leadership capacity.
“ Also, for managers in aged care, we all need [ to put in ] the time and effort to improve our leadership qualities, no matter how well or poorly experienced we are.
“ Accepting the fact we need to make a conscientious and conscious investment and seize any opportunity to work on those leadership qualities is critical in helping not only individual managers themselves but also others who are working as members of the team to improve quality care outcomes.”
The results of Jeon’ s findings are due to be released this year. She hopes they will contribute to“ addressing issues facing aged-care services and policymakers concerned with the provision of safe and quality aged-care services”.
HOUSEHOLD TECH’ S EFFECT ON RECOVERY Maayken van den Berg, a postdoctoral research fellow from Flinders University, is involved in the world’ s largest study on whether certain technologies can help patients recover from falls, strokes and brain injuries.
The aim?“ To use technology to enhance rehabilitation outcomes without a great increase in cost.”
Funded by the NHMRC, this study includes 300 patients recruited from the rehabilitation units at Adelaide Repatriation General Hospital, as well as Bankstown Hospital and the Brain Injury Rehab Unit at Liverpool Hospital – both in Sydney.
The team aims to build on the result of a pilot study, which featured 60 patients and showed the use of exergames is a feasible and acceptable way to promote mobility and activity levels. Results also showed improvements in balance and gait.
“ In the new study, we [ will assess ] whether a wider range of equipment technologies can lead to improvement in other aspects of mobility as well,” van den Berg confirms.
Researchers are recruiting in three groups, including one that focuses on older people and another on middle-aged to older people recovering from stroke. The third is one on younger brain injury patients.
Wii Fit, Xbox Kinect and pedometers such as Fitbits will be used, as well as‘ stepping tiles’ designed at UTS and exercise apps developed by Flinders University and The George Institute.
Feedback about performance of simple exercises will be fed back to patients through the game controls or onscreen.
“ We have chosen to use a variety of technology,” van den Berg says.“ We [ do not ] expect that every technology will be suitable for every patient, so we don’ t use a single approach. Instead, we use a wider range of devices and games.”
Feedback from patients thus far is positive and the hospitals involved are happy with the progress, she says.
“ We hope to show that the use of technology, including household technology, is a way to increase the dosage of practice in rehabilitation clinics, but also in the home environment. In other words, that it’ s a way to improve rehabilitation outcomes at low costs.” ■
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