Facilitated Online Video Interviewing with Older People with Advancing Frailty: A Novel Approach to Co-Production

ABSTRACT

Background/aims: The voices of older people with advancing frailty (OPWF) are less often heard in research, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. In-person video interviews with this population about their care needs were adapted to a facilitated online video design. This paper assesses whether this design can support older people's participation in and co-production of research. Methods: Video-recorded interviews (N=10) were undertaken October- November 2020 with multi-actor(a-d) involvement, where a cliniciana facilitated interviews from the OPWF'sb home with the research teamc interviewing remotely via Zoom. Unpaid carersd (N=5) sometimes supported interview participation. Ages ranged from 70-99, 6 men, 4 women, with no internet access (N=5) or family facilitated internet access (N=5), and Clinical Frailty Scores of 6 (N=5), 7 (N=4), or 8 (N=1). Results: Multi-actor involvement led to less structured encounters than planned and more intuitive, co-produced, and situationally led interviews. Those interviewed felt that they had more opportunities to speak about things that were important to them, often expressing anger in feeling isolated and forgotten during the pandemic. The clinician described the benefit of the time given to the encounter, of the different conversations arising from a non- “routine” visit, and reflected on the different roles they held in supporting the participant by checking their understanding, helping to pace the interview, support silences, and provide emotional support following interviews. Conclusions: Innovating research design during the pandemic to enhance older people's voices is challenging within normative expectations of funding and ethics bodies, yet, with less in-person research, presents opportunities to trial novel co-productive approaches to involve older people. This novel approach highlights challenges and opportunities for remotely co-producing research with OPWF, with high costs and skill-set requirements as barriers but rich data and open conversations as rewards.