Ageing in institutions: Quality of life perspectives and underlying reasons for residing in old age homes of Meerut

Abstract

Background: Old-age homes provide sheltered accommodation for elderly individuals, without any specialized nursing or health-care infrastructure, established for senior citizens who cannot stay with their families or are destitute. Quality of life is identified as an important concept and measure of outcomes in health care, and the concept is gaining significance, also in context of long-term care. The lack of family support made elderly resort to old age homes (OAHs) run by private or voluntary organization for their care and social support. Aim & Objective: 1. To assess the reasons for availing stay in old age homes 2. To estimate the quality of life among elderly individuals in old age homes. Settings and Design: An institutional-based cross-sectional study conducted in all elderly aged 60 years and above, residing for more than 1 month in old age homes of Meerut district. Methods and Material: Enumeration of all the residents was done by the investigator in all the 7 old age homes of Meerut.  Random selection of total 30 registered elderly by using lottery method from each old age home for the purpose of our study. So, the total participants taken for the study comes out to be 210. Tools used were semi structured schedule and OPQoL brief questionnaire. Statistical analysis used: Jamovi 2.3.28 Results: The main reason for staying in old age homes was loneliness, followed by strained relations. Overall mean score is 2.99, demonstrated moderate Quality of Life. Conclusions: No one to take care at home and loneliness was found to be the most common reason given by the elderly for staying in old age followed by misbehaviour by children. Only 2.8% elderly rated their overall quality of life (QoL) as “very good” while for majority (39.8%) it was “alright”.