Bay of Plenty to benefit from $5 million fund focused on ageing well

Bay of Plenty District Health Board will participate in the new trial. Photo / File

Helping people age well and retain a more active lifestyle in the process is the focus of a new $5 million fund.

And a handy smartphone app is just one of the ways in which the money will be used to help do that.

The funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) will support the AWESSoM (Ageing Well through Eating, Sleeping, Socialising and Mobility) trial, scheduled to begin in September and which the Bay of Plenty District Health Board will participate in.

AWESSoM is headed by Professor Ngaire Kerse, from the University of Auckland, but a researcher will be based in the Bay of Plenty throughout.

Part of the trial will involve adapting a smartphone LifeCurve app which supports healthy ageing.

Bay of Plenty District Health Board Allied Health Director Dr Sarah Mitchell said hundreds of people would be involved in the trial.

She said the aim was to make information about a person's health and services as accessible to them as possible and the trial would help determine the feasibility and applicability of the tool in helping Māori, Pacifika and Pākeha communities.

"The core purpose is to support people into ageing well by shifting the services into the community," she said.

Michell worked on a similar programme in Scotland.

"In Scotland, the LifeCurve is used to support healthy ageing and to identify where Allied Health professionals should be intervening."

Mitchell said the work looked at the sub-optimal life curve, where people endured a long period of decline, and the optimal curve, where people retained more function for longer as they aged.

"We're living longer but we don't want that to translate as just more years of decline.

"We want our work as Allied Health professionals to be improving people's lives and that means targeting the work earlier on the curve where it can have an impact and keep people more active and mobile," she said.

"What we found in Scotland was that 43 per cent of our work was taking place towards the end of the curve. So basically a massive amount of functional decline was going on without people seeing Allied Health professionals."

The proposed app would take people through a series of questions based on everyday tasks to assess their functionality, Mitchell said.

"This information will then be used to compare the user with others of comparable age. Normal ageing starts with the process of not being able to cut your toenails and progresses through a number of stages all the way through to not being able to eat independently."

"You can tell a person they are either mildly frail, moderately frail, or severely frail, but that doesn't mean anything to them and is a very deficit-based approach. But if you can tell them where they are based on what things they are able, or unable, to do, that means so much more and focuses on their assets rather than their deficits.

"This is where you are but if you do this, this and this, you can get better. It's simple but effective. It might also then suggest activities the person might like to pursue to improve or maintain their function.

Mitchell said that ultimately, they just wanted to help people live healthier, happier lives as they aged.

"The work in Scotland was based on where it was best to concentrate our efforts to do that. The idea was to shift our Allied Health expertise and in some cases resources much closer to the top of the curve so that people could benefit more."