During the COVID lockdowns, the University of Texas at Austin conducted an experiment in which they regularly called 240 homebound older adults. Within four weeks of these calls, seniors who’d experienced depression reported their symptoms easing with no other change in their lives but these regular phone calls.
The team at Ooma helped us understand why this finding matters by highlighting facts and figures about the senior loneliness epidemic and the effects of a simple phone call. The truth is, loneliness goes beyond unpleasantness and becomes a physiological stressor. The graphic highlights figures that illustrate the reality of senior loneliness as a public health crisis. Lonely seniors are at a 50% higher risk of dementia, 32% increased risk of stroke, 28% higher risk of hearing loss, and heart failure patients have a 4x mortality increase if they’re lonely. Isolation is a clinical condition with serious consequences that affects all aspects of health.
A map shows us which seniors are the most at risk based on geographic patterns. It highlights West Virginia seniors as the loneliest, a symptom of their rural lives with limited transportation options, weaker Internet access, and a cultural stigma around admitting loneliness in a tough, self-reliant community.
UT Austin’s call study, along with a trial from BASIL, and a HELPeN nursing student program, provided us with a powerful weapon against the epidemic. It’s a simple phone call. Research points to voice-based interactions as vastly more powerful than text-based interactions, though it’s worth noting a BYU study that found face-to-face contact to be the most common type of interaction. But when in-person visits aren’t possible, as they weren’t during the pandemic, we can’t underestimate the power of a phone call. For many seniors, this call is the reminder they need that someone cares and that they have a connection to the world outside their four walls.
