Framework for health care for the elderly in a rural context

Abstract

Introduction

Health care of elderly people in the rural context constitutes a relevant and current topic due to demographic change, setting an aging and lonely population. It’s in this framework, which analyzes the health caring into account of the autonomy, justice and equity, on a narrow connection with the environment.

Objective

It is therefore necessary to further our knowledge of health care for the elderly in rural context guided by the following objectives:

• present the socio-demographic portrait of the elderly;
• briefly describe the health status of the elderly;
• to assess the perception of the elderly’s quality of

Methods

This is a descriptive and correlational study, using the perception of the scale of quality of life (WHOQOL-Bref) and Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), a sample of 339 elderly living in rural villages.

Results

The results show mostly a female sample, married (55.5%), living alone (41.3%) with a low level of education (60.2%). We witness the predominance of Osteoarticular disorder (75.2%), and 87.3% of our sample take medication, more than 5 drugs, predominantly the pharmacological class of cardiovascular (92.4%) and analgesics (91.8%).

Older people perceive the quality of life as good, being higher in men (58.2%), and the female shows more feelings of loneliness and worse perception of quality of life.

Conclusion

It is imperative reshape the practice of healthcare professionals in implementing concrete programs and actions that take into account notions of literacy and accessibility in health and intersectional action models and (co) participating.