The health promotion topic that I am hoping to pursue in this course is social isolation in seniors. This is a topic that is quite near and dear to my heart from my time working as a physical therapist on an acute geriatrics medicine ward. Seniors have always been my favorite population to work with, but I have always felt that they are a very neglected sector of our health and social-care systems. When I was working as a clinician in this area I was struck by the high proportion of our inpatient population that was admitted with a “failure to thrive” or "failure to cope" diagnosis. Typically these catch-all terms were used to refer to seniors who were under-nourished, physically frail and not coping well in the community. Patients admitted as “failure to thrive” on my ward typically had excessively long length of stays, and ultimately spent many days and weeks designated as “Alternate Level of Care” while awaiting emergency placement from hospital to long term care. In my experience, the majority of these patients lived alone in the community and had limited social connections or social supports. In my current role as a Care Management Leader, I am also acutely aware of the limitations that our health care system has in terms of being able to put supports in place to assist those who are living alone and at risk of functional decline and poor health outcomes.
I am looking forward to learning more about the research that exists examining the health outcomes of social isolation in the geriatric population, as most of the information I have currently is based on my experiences as a clinician. I am also interested to find out more about the social determinants of health at play. For instance: are lower income seniors more at risk of social isolation and its negative effects? (I expect so, but I don’t have any evidence to back that up!). I am most interested and eager to learn about what kinds of interventions exist in Canada and elsewhere to target social isolation in the elderly population.
With this assignment and with this course overall, I am looking forward to learning about health promotion initiatives in a more general sense as this is an area that is completely new to me. I am hoping to learn more about what factors make a health promotion initiative more likely to be successful, and hoping to develop an understanding of useful models or frameworks that can be used in health promotion. I am a little apprehensive about being able to find an adequate amount of research on my chosen topic. Seniors health and welfare is not necessarily a “hot topic” so to speak, and I worry that I will be able to find enough relevant evidence, and in particular I worry about finding an evidence-based solution to my identified public health issue.
In an ideal world, I would love to be able to identify a health promotion project that could be realistically and sustainably be implemented within my health region. I truly believe that anything we can do to help prevent some of these “failure to thrive” hospitalizations (and subsequent long term care admissions) would not only improve the quality of life of many seniors immeasurably but also save the health care system money in the long run.
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