Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Clinical Research Centre, Block MD11, Level 2, 10 Medical Drive, Singapore, 117597, Singapore.
Center for Health Promotion Research, Department of Public Health and Nursing, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Postbox 8905, N-7491, Trondheim, Norway.
BMC Geriatr. 2020 Oct 19;20(1):411. doi: 10.1186/s12877-020-01810-6.
Care activities provided by community health practitioners for older adults primarily focused on disease prevention and management. However, healthy longevity can go beyond disease prevention and management and promote greater well-being by tapping into the accrual of resources that older adults possess using the salutogenic approach. This study explored how health resources are used among older adults who are residing in senior-only households to promote and maintain health, with the intent of providing insights into how community health practitioners can support these older adults via asset-based strategies.
We adopted a descriptive qualitative study design using focus group discussions. Twenty-seven older adults who either lived alone or with their spouses were purposively sampled from an elderly populated residential estate in Singapore. Six focus group discussions, conducted from December 2016 to May 2017, were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using thematic analysis.
The themes that emerged were 'tapping on internal self-care repository', 'maintaining and preserving informal social support', and 'enabling self by using environmental aids', and an eco-map of aging assets was used to capture an overview of internal and external resources. With the repository of personal strengths, knowledge, and experiences, these older adults were generally resourceful in navigating around their resource-rich environments to cope with everyday life stressors and promote health. However, they were occasionally limited by individual factors that affected their comprehension, access, maintenance, and utilization of resources.
The eco-map of aging assets can be used as an assessment framework by community health practitioners to recognize, consider, and build a repertoire of resources among these older adults. It serves as a gentle reminder to adopt an ecological approach in considering and tapping into older adults' wide-ranging personal, social, and environmental resources. Community health practitioners can support resource integration as resource facilitators via cognitive, behavioral, and motivational salutogenic pathways to overcome resource mobilization barriers faced by older adults. Such an approach helps older adults to find their internal capabilities and abilities to know who, where, what, and how to seek external resources to identify solutions, creating the intrinsic value to sustain their actions on resource utility.
社区卫生工作者为老年人提供的护理活动主要侧重于疾病预防和管理。然而，健康长寿不仅可以预防和管理疾病，还可以通过利用老年人所拥有的资源，采用健康促进模式来促进更大的幸福感。本研究探讨了居住在仅老年人家庭中的老年人如何利用健康资源来促进和维持健康，旨在为社区卫生工作者提供如何通过基于资产的策略来支持这些老年人的见解。
我们采用描述性定性研究设计，使用焦点小组讨论。从新加坡一个老年人居住的住宅区有目的地抽取了 27 名独自或与配偶一起生活的老年人作为研究对象。2016 年 12 月至 2017 年 5 月期间进行了六次焦点小组讨论，讨论内容被录音、转录，并使用主题分析进行分析。
出现的主题是“利用内在自我保健资源”、“维护和保持非正式社会支持”以及“利用环境辅助来实现自我”，并使用老龄化资产生态图来捕捉内部和外部资源的概述。这些老年人凭借个人优势、知识和经验储备，通常能够在资源丰富的环境中灵活应对日常生活压力源，促进健康。然而，他们偶尔会受到个人因素的限制，这些因素会影响他们对资源的理解、获取、维护和利用。
老龄化资产生态图可作为社区卫生工作者的评估框架，用于识别、考虑和建立这些老年人的资源组合。它提醒人们采用生态方法来考虑和利用老年人广泛的个人、社会和环境资源。社区卫生工作者可以通过认知、行为和动机健康促进途径作为资源促进者来支持资源整合，以克服老年人面临的资源动员障碍。这种方法帮助老年人发现自身内在能力，了解自己在哪里、需要什么以及如何寻求外部资源来寻找解决方案，从而创造内在价值，维持他们对资源利用的行动。
