Introduction
health difficulties, diabetes
RECRUITMENT, DIABETES
The Community Paramedicine at Home (CP@home) program is a health promotion program, originally implemented in Ontario, Canada, that involves community paramedics visiting homes and conducting health risk assessments with frequent 9-1-1 callers and those who call for at least one ‘lift assist.’ Paramedics provide blood pressure, diabetes and fall risk assessments, health education/promotion and targeted referrals to in-house wellness programs and community resources. This program aims to reduce the frequency of 9-1-1 calls in vulnerable populations by providing health assessments and managing participants’ chronic conditions at home with their family doctor and with other community resources. These high frequency 9-1-1 callers could be defined as a hard-to-reach population with a lower quality of life and often have multiple health difficulties and disparities [Additionally, poverty rates are higher in frequent 9-1-1 callers. Poverty produces multiple health care barriers due to unstable living arrangements, a failure to access required medications, and the inability to make healthy food choices. Consequently, manageable health conditions are left unmonitored and eventually require intervention through emergency services [This paper explores participant recruitment of a community-based RCT conducted in four Ontario regions to evaluate the effectiveness of the CP@home program [This paper aims to describe the challenges met when recruiting for a community randomized control trial on high frequency 9-1-1 callers and to compare demographic characteristics, recruitment methods and reasons for calling 9-1-1 between those who could be contacted and those who could not be contacted by the RCT research team members, as well as between those who participated and those who did not participate in CP@home.