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Review
. 2022 Jan 31;12(1):e054492.
doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2021-054492.

What long-term care interventions have been published between 2010 and 2020? Results of a WHO scoping review identifying long-term care interventions for older people around the world

Natalia Arias-Casais  1 , Jotheeswaran Amuthavalli Thiyagarajan  2 , Monica Rodrigues Perracini  3 , Eunok Park  4 , Lieve Van den Block  5   6 , Yuka Sumi  2 , Ritu Sadana  2 , Anshu Banerjee  2 , Zee-A Han  7
Affiliations
Review

What long-term care interventions have been published between 2010 and 2020? Results of a WHO scoping review identifying long-term care interventions for older people around the world

Natalia Arias-Casais et al. BMJ Open. .

Abstract

Objective: The global population is rapidly ageing. To tackle the increasing prevalence of older adults' chronic conditions, loss of intrinsic capacity and functional ability, long-term care interventions are required. The study aim was to identify long-term care interventions reported in scientific literature from 2010 to 2020 and categorise them in relation to WHO's public health framework of healthy ageing.

Design: Scoping review conducted on PubMed, CINHAL, Cochrane and Google Advanced _targeting studies reporting on long-term care interventions for older and frail adults. An internal validated Excel matrix was used for charting.Setting nursing homes, assisted care homes, long-term care facilities, home, residential houses for the elderly and at the community.

Inclusion criteria: Studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 1 January 2010 to 1 February 2020 on implemented interventions with outcome measures provided in the settings mentioned above for subjects older than 60 years old in English, Spanish, German, Portuguese or French.

Results: 305 studies were included. Fifty clustered interventions were identified and organised into four WHO Healthy Ageing domains and 20 subdomains. All interventions delved from high-income settings; no interventions from low-resource settings were identified. The most frequently reported interventions were multimodal exercise (n=68 reports, person-centred assessment and care plan development (n=22), case management for continuum care (n=16), multicomponent interventions (n=15), psychoeducational interventions for caregivers (n=13) and interventions mitigating cognitive decline (n=13).

Conclusion: The identified interventions are diverse overarching multiple settings and areas seeking to prevent, treat and improve loss of functional ability and intrinsic capacity. Interventions from low-resource settings were not identified.

Keywords: geriatric medicine; health services administration & management; public health.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Shows the process followed to select the articles included in this study. Repeated articles were deleted. Two researches (NA-C and BW) independently reviewed all articles by title and abstract. On title and abstract agreement, articles were selected for full text assessment. Discrepancies were discussed to reach agreement (NA-C, BW and Z-AH). Articles selected for full-text assessment were downloaded and managed using the MENDELEY reference manager software. An additional ‘snow-balling’ approach was conducted on the reference section of selected articles to identify other relevant studies. Adapted from Moher et al.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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References

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