Collaboration for preventive self-care in home-dwelling older adults

The older population in Sweden is rapidly increasing and the majority of older persons will live at home rather than in municipality institutional care. To maintain independence and good quality of life preventive health care and social care will be important. Self-care is one way to stay independent, however assistance to conduct self-care might be crucial.

Possible areas to appraoch are prevention of falls, malnutrition and mental illness.In this project we address the issue of how self-care can be assisted, and how primary health care and social services can, with the guidance of the older persons themselves, develop ways to cooperate.

Our hypothesis is that the tool “self-care verifications” has potential play a key role to define collaboration between primary health care and social services in preventive self-care.The aim of this project is therefore to investigate how the self-care verification can be used as a tool to strengthen collaboration from primary health care and social services for effective and equal prevention of ill-health and functional decline in home-dwelling older adults with home-help services.

We are interested in understanding to what extent and for what type of care the self-care verification is used today by primary health care and social services.

We will investigate what enables and/or hinders collaboration between primary health care and social services based on self-care verifications for preventive self-care from the professionals´ perspective?

The project will put emphasis on the older persons’ perspectives and what factors are important for them in their decision to receive assistance offered from social services to perform self-care.The models that will be developed with all stakeholders through a participatory development and research approach.

And in the final part of the project the accumulated results and experiences from the previous parts will result in the designing and testing of models for self-care facilitation.