About Us
Research & Quality Improvement

Dania Home Society, Gerontology and Diabetes Research Laboratory (GDRL) of the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute, and the Division of Geriatric Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of British Columbia have been working in partnership since 2021 to address the ongoing problem within long term care and assisted living of frequent fallers.  Together we are looking at 5 years of retroactive residential care data to develop a falls risk tool for using supervised machine learning methods, to pinpoint potential reversible factors to reduce falls in resident in long term care.  We hypothesize that by dividing our retrospective data into training and validation datasets, we will be able to use supervised machine learning methods (such as neural networks, decision trees, random forests) to optimize a falls risk prediction tool.

Dania Society has worked with Simon Fraser University’s Department of Gerontology to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on health, well-being and advance care planning among LGBT, Chinese, South Asian and general population older Canadians and residents of independent supportive housing or assisted living.  This study was part of a series being conducted under the Canadian Frailty Network (Formerly TVN) Transformative Grant Program. The focus was on increasing the uptake, impact, and access to Advance Care Planning for frail elderly Canadians across the continuum of care, i.e., from primary care through to long term care and hospital care.  Currently, we are looking at the effects of social isolation on our seniors during the pandemic and determining if interventions such as music therapy, technology use (e.g., tablets with internet access), and prescribed exercise can improve their situation.

Dania Home is participating in an immunity study with Bruyère Research Institute and The University of Ottawa where antibody levels of COVID vaccinated and non-vaccinated residents as well as vaccinated staff are monitored for an extended period to learn about the change of immunity against COVID-19 over time within our resident and staff populations.