Home-based Extended Rehabilitation for Older People with Frailty (HERO): a Randomised Controlled Trial

Objective

To evaluate whether home-based extended rehabilitation for older people with frailty after hospitalisation with an acute illness or injury can improve physical health-related quality of life and is cost-effective.

Trial design

Pragmatic, multi-centre, individually randomised controlled parallel group superiority trial with economic evaluation and embedded process evaluation.

Setting

Recruitment from 15 NHS Trusts in England, with home-based intervention delivery.

Participants

Eligible participants were 65 years or older with mild/moderate/severe frailty (score of 5-7 on Clinical Frailty Scale) admitted to hospital with acute illness/injury, then discharged home directly, or from intermediate care (post-acute care) rehabilitation services. Recruitment took place December 2017 to August 2021, with follow-up to August 2022.

Interventions

Participants were randomly assigned (1.28:1) to the Home-based Older People’s Exercise (HOPE) programme - a 24-week home-based manualised, progressive exercise intervention as extended rehabilitation, or usual care (control). Participants were not masked to allocation.

Main outcome measures

Primary outcome was physical health-related quality of life, measured using the physical component summary (PCS) of the modified Short Form 36-item health questionnaire (SF36) at 12 months. Secondary outcomes at six and 12 months included physical and mental health-related quality of life, functional independence, death, hospitalisations and care home admissions. Researchers involved in data collection were masked to allocation.

Results

We randomised 740 participants (410 HOPE, 330 control) across 15 sites. 479 (64.7%) participants completed 12-month follow-up. 188 HOPE participants (45.9%) completed 24 weeks of intervention delivery. Over half of participants completed more than 75% of prescribed exercises.

Intention-to-treat analyses showed no evidence that HOPE was superior to control for 12-month PCS score (adjusted mean difference −0.22, 95% CI −1.47 to 1.03; p = 0.73). There was some evidence of a higher rate of all-cause hospitalisations in the control arm (incidence rate ratio 1.12, 95% CI 1.00 to 1.25; p = 0.05), but no differences in other outcomes. The process evaluation found the intervention was largely delivered as intended and proved acceptable to most participants. The economic analysis showed HOPE plus usual care costs of GB£1,401 with 0.024 QALY improvement compared to the control. Incremental cost-effectiveness ratio GB£58,375.

Limitations

The HERO trial was delivered during especially challenging circumstances that included the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined outcomes taking account of this but detected no difference in primary or secondary outcomes, providing reassurance that COVID-19 was unlikely to have influenced trial results.

Conclusions

Based on our findings, we do not recommend routine commissioning of extended rehabilitation for older people with frailty after discharge home from hospital or intermediate care, following an acute admission with a medical illness or injury.

Trial registration

ISRCTN-13927531 (19/04/2017).