A Matter of Balance/Volunteer Lay Leader Program
Principal Investigator: Tara Healy, College of Arts & Sciences
Funder: US Department of Health & Human Services, Administration on Aging
Southern Maine Agency on Aging (SMAA), in collaboration with Partnership for Health Aging, Maine Medical Center´s Geriatric Center, the University of Southern Maine´s School of Social Work, and the Maine State Housing Authority, will address the issue of fall prevention using "A Matter of Balance/Volunteer Lay Leader Model." The program will be grounded in the evidence-based intervention "A Matter of Balance" (MOB) that was developed, implemented and tested under the auspices of the Roybal Center for Research in Applied Gerontology at Boston University and New England Research Institutes with funding from the National Institute on Aging. Because the original program uses professional leaders, dissemination has been greatly limited due to cost and availability of professional leaders. This project will introduce the use of Volunteer Lay Leaders in order to achieve cost effectiveness and allow for a much wider dissemination of the program than is possible with the use of professional leaders.
This project will bring together the expertise of the area agency on aging, a community service provider focusing upon health promotion, prevention and wellness, geriatric health specialists, and University research and program evaluation experts to disseminate a newly designed fear of falling intervention to older adults in Maine. It´s anticipated that older adults participating in "A Matter of Balance: A Volunteer Lay leader Model" will achieve outcomes that are comparable to those achieved in the program lead by professional leaders. It is also anticipated that the program design will reduce the cost of the intervention, allowing MOB to be offered more frequently, in a variety of settings, reaching a significantly higher number of older adults than would otherwise be possible.
Both process and outcome evaluations will be conducted in order to provide interested providers with a clearly replicable program design. Tara Healy will be giving three national presentations and one international presentation based on this work during the academic year to facilitate future replication of the Volunteer Lay Leader Model.