They were also intended to widen the availability of drinks and snacks (to visitors as well as residents), encourage greater independence on the part of residents in choosing and obtaining their own snacks, and generally reduce the feeling of institutionalisation. Data from care notes were limited by missing data, as many participants were not present for the whole of the first and second years.
Exclusion criteria were communication difficulties (primarily due to stroke, dementia, hearing difficulties, confusion or disorientation), alcohol abuse, participation in other ongoing studies and more or less permanent institutionalisation. Data were obtained from semi-structured patient interviews were performed by trained interviewers.
Other limitations reflect the limitations of the observational study used as the source for the data on institutionalisation.
Follow-up data on institutionalisation were obtained from the Cork Local Placement Forum which co-ordinates Long Term Care (LTC).
Data on institutionalisation and death were regularly updated by telephone contact with the participants or their nominated contact person at 4-monthly intervals.
Four papers [ 9, 10, 19, 29], reporting on three study populations, were identified which had examined the associations between at least one of the specified measures of physical capability and subsequent hospitalisation or institutionalisation (Table 1 and Supplementary data available in Age and Ageing online).
Data for all patient-level outcomes including total mortality and cause-specific mortality (cardiovascular and infection), major cardiovascular events, fatal and non-fatal myocardial infarction, fatal and non-fatal stroke, institutionalisation, and withdrawal from treatment will be obtained through data linkages to a centralised database.
A conference poster in September 2009 19 and a registry posting in May 2010 16 did not report details of important clinical data (ADAS-Cog, Neuropsychiatric Inventory, time to institutionalisation) but reported that there was no significant benefit of memantine on these measures at 12 months.
In this study, we decided to focus on the impact of home and community-based services on hospitalisation and institutionalisation after adjusting for the use of medical services by using health insurance data and LTCI data from a small community.
The data from the Ministries on the rate of institutionalisation of children and the rate of juvenile offending was used in order to, along with the qualitative data, measure the impact of the Project against the Project aims.
This number is also large enough (again extrapolated from our own data) to detect differences in specialist care and institutionalisation (e.g., to detect a difference in mean hospital days of 10 days over a 1.5 year period).
