NCT04609371

PanDirect: Self-care Tools and Telephone Coaching for Depression and Anxiety During Pandemics

Completed NA Last updated 21 September 2021

What this trial tests

NA trial testing self-care tools in Mental Health Wellness 1 in 90 participants. Completed in 1 May 2021.

Timeline

21 October 2020

Primary endpoint
1 March 2021

1 May 2021

Quick facts

Lead sponsor	St. Mary's Research Center, Canada
Phase	NA
Status	Completed
Study type	INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation	randomized
Design	parallel
Masking	single
Primary purpose	supportive care
Enrollment	90
Start date	21 October 2020
Primary completion	1 March 2021
Estimated completion	1 May 2021
Sites	1 location across Canada

Drugs / interventions tested

• self-care tools
• lay telephone coaching

Conditions studied

• Mental Health Wellness 1 — all drugs for Mental Health Wellness 1 →
• Coaching — all drugs for Coaching →
• Pandemic — all drugs for Pandemic →
• Depression, Anxiety — all drugs for Depression, Anxiety →

Sponsor

St. Mary's Research Center, Canada — full company profile →

Who can join

65 and older, any sex, with Mental Health Wellness 1 or Coaching. Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.

Sponsor's own description

During pandemics older adults with chronic physical conditions are a particularly vulnerable population for unmet mental health needs. This is a consequence of a number of factors which include decreased access to their doctors because of restrictions in visits in order to decrease risk of disease transmission and because doctors are seconded to provide medical services in areas of high priority. Since Public Health authorities worry that pandemics may be a reality of the future, this study is being operationalized during the present COVID-19 pandemic in order to see what can be learned about different ways to provide mental health care under such constraints.

The study offers evidence-based approaches to managing feelings of anxiety or depression that may have existed prior to the onset of a pandemic, or that have arisen during a pandemic. It uses principles of cognitive behavioural therapy in which participants are offered self-care tools to help them develop strategies for dealing with their various symptoms. These tools have already been shown by the team to be effective in other contexts in studies DIRECT-sc (Effectiveness of a supported self-care intervention for depression compared to an unsupported intervention in older adults with chronic physical illnesses) and CanDIRECT (Effectiveness of a telephone-supported depression self-care intervention for cancer survivors).

The present study, PanDIRECT (Assisting Family Physicians with Gaps in Mental Health Care Generated by the COVID-19 Pandemic), aims to answer the following questions:

1. Can these tools be used in the community care of mental health problems during pandemics?
2. Are they acceptable to patients?
3. Using a randomized control trial, does lay-coaching of use of these tools improve their use and patient outcomes?
4. Do family practitioners value patient information sent to them at the end of the trial

Publications & conference data

1 peer-reviewed publication reference this trial (live from Europe PMC):

1. Self-care interventions to assist family physicians with mental health care of older patients during the COVID-19 pandemic: Feasibility, acceptability, and outcomes of a pilot randomized controlled trial.
   Yaffe MJ, McCusker J, Lambert SD, Haggerty J, et al · · 2024 · cited 2× · PMID 38358971 · DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0297937