IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v40y1995i4p437-442.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Health and social status of an elderly urban population in Sri Lanka

Author

Listed:
  • Nugegoda, D. B.
  • Balasuriya, S.

Abstract

Although Sri Lanka has generally a young demographic profile, with decreasing overall mortality and birth rates, its population is aging gradually and will continue to do so in the future. In order to have an idea of the needs of the elderly a survey was conducted in a sample of randomly selected Sinhalese elders living in an urban community. Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) assessments were done. Ten percent of the respondents had at least one ADL impairment. Another ten percent had only IADL impairment. The commonest ADL to be affected were bathing and feeding. Children and the family provide all care for the impaired elderly. The family support system should be encouraged and assisted to prevent the necessity for more formal and expensive institutional care. A large proportion of the elderly were handicapped with defects in vision and hearing and the absence of teeth. Correction of these defects would improve both quality of life of these subjects and reduce their risk of accidents.

Suggested Citation

  • Nugegoda, D. B. & Balasuriya, S., 1995. "Health and social status of an elderly urban population in Sri Lanka," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 40(4), pages 437-442, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:40:y:1995:i:4:p:437-442
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(94)00144-I
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dhammika Deepani Siriwardhana & Kate Walters & Greta Rait & Juan Carlos Bazo-Alvarez & Manuj Chrishantha Weerasinghe, 2018. "Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric evaluation of the Sinhala version of Lawton Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Scale," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(6), pages 1-20, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:40:y:1995:i:4:p:437-442. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.