Problems in intervention and evaluation. A case report of a community-based rehabilitation and activation programme...

A rehabilitation and activation programme for elderly and disabled home nursing patients and home help clients was launched in Posio, Finland, in 1979. The evaluation of the controlled intervention programme took two years. Only a few positive results were obtained. The self-perceived health of the elderly and disabled improved, and they used outpatient services other than physiotherapy less frequently than did the control group. The difficulties of this evaluative study were many, one problem being the low quality of outcome measures. To carry out interdisciplinary evaluative studies, the following recommendations are proposed, based on the experiences of this study: the staff in charge should have previous experience of research; an outside researcher is recommended; the connected study should not be overemphasized, in order to avoid extra pressures on the workers; the time needed to develop the routines for collecting data and writing reports should be estimated in advance and divided between the collaborators; information should be collected by many methods; possible difficulties should be anticipated; besides a local organizing body, a separate, independent and interdisciplinary supervisory team is important; any intervention should be based on the interest of several instances.