Caring Calls: A Weekly Phone Call Intervention and the Correlation with Loneliness in Rural Dwelling Adults

Purpose: This pilot study’s aim was to examine the impact of weekly phone calls from interprofessional students on loneliness in rural dwelling adults. Design: A pretest and posttest quasi-experimental design was utilized. Setting: The intervention was based in southeastern Minnesota, although the participants could have lived anywhere. Zoom for Healthcare © was utilized, and students were able to make the phone calls from their homes, therefore, no travel was necessary. Subjects: The subjects were rural dwelling adults (over the age 18 years old). Intervention: Interprofessional students made weekly social phone calls to rural dwelling adults over ten weeks. Measures: The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Loneliness Scale was used to compare the level of loneliness prior to the intervention to after the intervention. Results: A Wilcoxon non-parametric test was conducted to analyze results. The overall average of the scores was -0.39, showing there was a decrease in loneliness over the ten weeks among participants, although not statistically significant (p = 0.25) Conclusion: Although there was a decrease in loneliness among the participants, the sample size was small, and the results were not statistically significant. More research is needed on this topic to determine if phone calls from students can decrease loneliness in rural-dwelling adults