Swinburne University of Technology in partnership with Silver Chain Group Ltd has been awarded an ARIIA grant for their project ‘An innovative digitally enabled intervention to reduce depression in home-based aged care’.
With a growing number of Australians receiving aged care at home and an increase in depression rates in this population, innovative approaches to address depression are urgently required. Australia faces critical shortages in the aged care and the mental health workforce. Depressed home care recipients have poor access to evidence-based treatments.
Digital technologies offer an opportunity to deliver interventions at scale to reach the rapidly increasing number of depressed older Australians receiving aged care at home. While there has been enormous growth in digital mental health programs recently, they have nearly always been designed for younger people. Yet, many older adults are interested in and engage with a range of digital technologies. Our research addresses the gap in availability of effective digitally enabled interventions for depression designed specifically for aged care.
Building on previous work, we will co-design and pilot an innovative intervention for depression for older adults living at home and evaluate its feasibility and acceptability. The intervention will comprise psychological strategies with proven efficacy for older adults, delivered using digital technologies.
This project will assist the aged care workforce to use digital technologies to deliver best practice interventions to older Australians living at home with depression.