Older Adults’ Perception of Their Needs in Tehran: A Cry for Emotional and Social Support

INTRODUCTION: Background and purpose: Human’s longevity has increased with advances in health and better management of communicable diseases. Therefore, the number of older adult is increasing in developed and developing countries. A glimpse at studies reveals that identifying elderly’s health needs has been mainly based on the experts’ understanding, while older adult themselves have rarely expressed their own opinions. This study aimed to better understand Tehran, Iran elderly’s perception of their own health needs.

METHODS: In this qualitative study, with purposeful sampling, data was collected by conducting deep semi-structured interviews with elderlies aged 60-84 years, residing at their private houses. After 19 interviews, the data achieved saturation. The content of the interviews was analyzed through content-analysis approach.

RESULTS: Data analyses led to extracting main categories of needs in different domains. The main health needs in physical health domain included: having a healthy lifestyle, independence and safety. Regarding elders’ mental health, coping with their aging, inner tranquility; regarding their spiritual health, the need to have a meaning in life and faithfulness in religion were identified as main groups of needs. And the most important among their main social health needs were the needs for emotional and social support, social involvement and instrumental social support.

CONCLUSION: Although, a wide range of physical, mental and social needs were raised, some were more important. Fulfilling the emotional needs in social health had the highest frequency among the needs expressed by the contributors. Following that with a notable difference were the frequencies of having a healthy lifestyle, independence and inner tranquility. This means that attempts to address elderly health needs should avoid focusing mainly or even only on disease related needs and serious attention should be paid to their emotional and social needs.