Health Innovations in Elderly Care

Abstract

Demographic transition has taken place in the world population and this has led to an increase in the number of older people in the world. Aging has been associated with chronic diseases and disabilities.This situation has increased with time and has significant challenges and implications to the administration, health and social services provisions etc. For this reason, there has been a need for health innovations that would ensure the continuity of quality elderly care and ensure healthy aging. To achieve health innovations, there is need to know the existing innovations. This study aimed at answering the question of “What health innovations are there in elderly care?”.

A systematic literature search was conducted through Laurea’s electronic databases . Three databases were used; CINAHL with fulltext (EBSCO),ProQuest Central and SAGE Premier 2012. With a suitable combination of search terms and limitation to articles published after January 2010 or before December 2016, the initial search yielded a total of 283,117 articles. These articles were finally reduced to 9 used in the study following a step by step application of the limitation criteria and a critical appraisal of the articles. The 9 articles were coded and analysed by qualitative analysis.

The findings showed that health innovations in elderly care have taken place in five main areas that included technological innovation, medical innovation, innovation in educatin and communication, environmental and economics innovation, managerial innovation. However, technological innovation is at the centre of most other health innovations.