Health related resources among older persons that receive preventive home visits: implications for further recommendations on health promotion

In the sustainable development goals for 2030 the emphasis is on health promotion to enable healthy lives and wellbeing for all. Health promotion from an individual perspective focus on enabling the person to take control and improve health, by focusing on positive health related resources. Health promotion can be applied to older persons during a preventive home visit (PHV). Most of the studies made on PHVs to older persons have focused on risk factors. Suggestions for improvement of the PHV would be to add recommendations that promote health related resources, not only look at risk factors. In order to develop health promotion for older persons there is a need for research about positive health related resources. Therefore this study aim for exploring health related resources that could be found among older persons that have received a PHV.

Methods: A cross-sectional study design was used including older persons age ≥75 years old, living in their own homes, and that had received PHV. Data were collected during a period of nine months, in two municipalities in the south of Sweden. Questions covered wellbeing, nutrition, physical health, functional ability, housing and economy. Binary logistic regression was used to analyse data.

Results: In total 625 older persons were included in the study, 55.4 % were women, mean age was 80.6 (standard deviation 2.2 years). Preliminary results indicate that following factors are significantly associated with good general health (adjusting for age and gender): being able to do things that make one feel valuable, satisfied with existence, physically active several times per week, having no physical problems to participate in social activities, not feeling sad, not having reduced energy and not having reduced endurance.

Conclusion: This results indicate that it can be of importance to pay attention to some specific health related resources when giving health promotion advices during the PHV.