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Review
. 2021 Jan 16;9(1):83.
doi: 10.3390/healthcare9010083.

Age-Friendly Health Care: A Systematic Review

Jéssica Tavares  1 , Gonçalo Santinha  1 , Nelson P Rocha  2
Affiliations
Review

Age-Friendly Health Care: A Systematic Review

Jéssica Tavares et al. Healthcare (Basel). .

Abstract

Background: Health care provided to older adults must take into account the characteristics of chronic diseases and the comorbidities resulting from ageing. However, health services are still too oriented towards acute situations. To overcome this problem, the World Health Organization (WHO) proposed a set of Age-Friendly Principles that seek to optimize the provision of health care for this population. This article aims to understand how such Principles are considered in the implementation of age-friendly health care worldwide.

Methods: A systematic review was conducted to synthesize the literature on age-friendly health care in accordance with the PRISMA recommendations in the PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases.

Results: The research identified 34 articles, with only seven recognizing the WHO Principles and only four using the implementation toolkit. In addition, in the context of primary care, three studies recognize the WHO Principles, but only two use the toolkit.

Conclusions: The WHO Principles are being implemented in health care, but in a smaller scale than desired, which reveals possible flaws in their dissemination and standardization. Thus, a greater scientific investment in age-friendly health care should be considered, which represents a greater operationalization of the Principles and an evaluation of their effectiveness and impacts.

Keywords: age-friendly principles; education and training; health care providers; management health system; physical environment.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flowchart of systematic review.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Number of publications by the main authors of the studies.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Number of publications by institutions affiliated with more than one author.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Number of publications per year.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Number of publications by main types of health care provision.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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