Prevention and Longevity
Brief Memory Training Program for Older Adults
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hannah Jensen-Fielding, Nancy Pachana, Leander Mitchell
TTIYM has been designed in response to older adult’s concerns about memory efficiency and the potential deterioration to dementia. TTIYM brings together several fields of psychology aiming to create and validate a memory training program that is effective, generalizable, and inexpensive enough to be offered in the community. The two main themes behind the program are simple and generalizable memory strategies (self-testing and spaced-retrieval) and building participant’s memory self-efficacy. These two themes are not only in what is taught to the participant’s but also in the structure of the program. The program itself requires two three-hour sessions (a week apart) followed by regular reminders to use the strategies for the four weeks following the second session. This study measures the effectiveness and generalizability of the training by using tasks, which apart from one, are not covered in the training program. The exception is only spoken about and not practised in the program. The task themselves include name-face, text learning, and place learning because of their ecological validity. As the training focuses on strategies that only require cognition, if successful, the program can be modified to suit cognitively healthy older adults that have other health issues such as blindness.
Educational Program for Older Adults as a Source of Health Promotion
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barbara Borges
Advances in medicine, new technologies, as well as social and economic development have increased longevity, but longevity is not everything; we must think about the importance of living longer with a good quality of life. Their health and well-being in the community and society will have more of an impact as time goes by for all generations. The challenge is to consider how to increase the quality of life, years and independence for an individual and to combat ageism. This ethnographic study explored how older adults in Canada and Brazil perceive education that has been designed specifically for them and how they understand it to be linked to healthy living and well-being. The purpose of this study was: to learn more about and be better able to describe the overall impact of education in the lives of older adults; to better understand what older adults imagine the future potential impact of education is for them, including the concepts of healthy living and well-being; and to delineate recommendations for curriculum development, as well as broader institutional and policy-related strategies, in order to expand and develop the state of education for older adults with the focus on healthy living and well-being.
Promoting Nutrition and Oral Health in Grandparent Care: Reflections from Parents and Grandparents
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lauren Carpenter
Grandparent care is the most common type of informal childcare used for preschool aged children. Despite this, little is known about the influence of this care environment on health behaviours. This study aimed to describe influences that grandparent care environments have on children’s oral health and nutrition from the perspective of grandparents and parents; identify health promotion opportunities in the grandparent care environment. Eleven semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight grandparents and five parents. Grandparents cared for their preschool aged grandchildren for at least five hours each week. Analyses were informed by the socio-ecological model of health, family systems theory and guided by grounded theory. Oral health emerged as a less emotive topic and primarily a parental responsibility compared nutrition. Past experiences, communication and mutual respect emerged as key influences on children’s nutrition and oral health. Grandparents drew on their own experiences and were conscious of the influence that their actions had on both their grandchild and the child’s parents. Parents were conscious of balancing their child’s nutritional needs whilst not denying grandparents the opportunity to play the traditional role of "treat giver." Discussion Open communication and mutual respect between families contributes to an optimal environment for promoting young children’s health. Opportunities exist to implement simple oral health promotion strategies in the grandparent care environment, however implementing nutrition promotion strategies would prove more complex with a need to identify key aspects of the care environment before implementation.
From Medical Gaze to Smart Wearables : Exploring the Trends in Health Monitoring under Post-modernism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sonal Mobar Roy
The society today is riddled with a colossal number of health and wellness concerns. Despite the progress in social and economic aspects, the world is fraught with the exigencies at large. The paradigm shift that took place from the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals has clearly earmarked the issues related to health, wellness and sanitation and helped in drawing attention of the policy-makers. With the changing demographics and disease epidemiologies, the world is faltering in parameters of mortality rates due to rise in various communicable and non-communicable diseases, that could be prevented if timely monitoring and reporting had been done. Through the review of literature, it is implicit that the technological interventions have the due potential to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of healthcare and allied domains. In this paper, the author draws a tangential framework, beginning from Michele Foucault’s “medical gaze” to the current trend of “smart wearables,” to monitor one’s health indicators and discusses the underpinnings of the above mentioned paradigm shift that has occurred with passing time, under the theoretical framework of post-modernism. One of the aims of health policies have been prevention of diseases and promotion of good health through cross-sectoral action and access to technologies to provide universal access to healthcare. Timely monitoring leads to "preventive approach" of treatment rather than "curative approach," resulting in less medical expenditures. The paper suggests that monitoring has advanced significantly with technological interventions playing an active role, resulting in better health statistics.
