Objectives
To assess the long-term effectiveness (18 month follow-up) of a complex intervention on sedentary behaviour (SB) and physical activity (PA) in a community dwelling older population based on existing exercise referral schemes (ERS) enhanced by self-management-strategies (SMS).
Vision
“SITLESS will provide a breakthrough in the field of physical activity promotion with and without self-management-strategies to reduce sedentary behavior, since it combines several already tested concepts but that have never been proofed together in such a comprehensive and multidimensional way with an important focus on long term effects.“.
Aims
SITLESS aims to impact health policy makers with evidence-based knowledge to improve existing ERS making them more effective.
SITLESS aims to achieve an optimization in healthcare working simultaneously in the three dimensions: 1) improving the patient care experience, 2) improving the health of populations and 3) reducing the per capita cost of health care (Berwicket al., 2008)
SITLESS aims at decreasing sedentary behaviour and improving physical function.
The intervention of SITLESS will be innovative at combining a behavioural approach at individual level with social and environmental aspects at a community level in order to achieve a maintenance and adherence of older people to physical activity.
The broad range of outcomes is highly relevant from a health policy perspective, and will allow assessing the effect of the studied interventions from a biopsychosocial perspective of health.
SITLESS applies frailty-related biomarkers in the RCT to advance current knowledge on the physiopathological ways of sedentary behaviour and analyse the effects of the intervention on them.
SITLESS applies a multimethodology. It uses mixed methods complementing the best available evidence-based procedures such as RCT with qualitative procedures in order to guarantee an intervention adapted to the local context, culture and participants needs, and to detect intervention effects difficult to detect with scales.
A gender-sensitive approach will be followed including intersectionality with age, income, education and ethnicity. This perspective has been lacking so far when intervening in older people to increase their physical activity.
SITLESS will challenge current policy makers following a corpocentric and often sport-centered strategies, by promoting a concept of physical activity rooted in an individual’s everyday life and local context.
The SITLESS consortium is constituted by a transdisciplinary team, able to design and apply a comprehensive approach to tackle sedentary behaviour as the multidimensional problem that it is.
SITLESS promotes active ageing as recommended by WHO) at an individual level and at policy level (http://whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/2002/WHO_NMH_NPH_02.8.pdf?ua=1)