Quality of Life, Psychosocial Health and Health Care among Aging People in Chiang Rai Province, Thailand: The First Phase

Abstract

The aging populations in Thailand have been rapidly increasing, and most of them are suffering on disabilities and diseases. This situation might be effect to aging population and families, Chiang Rai province is also in this situation. Aims of this study were to explore quality of life (QOL) by using WHOQOL-BREF, to access the level of  depression using MoPH depression screening form, to describe daily activities by using Activities of daily living (ADL) and Instrumental activities of daily living (IADL), and to describe the perception towards  health and social services among aging people. Descriptive study was used with multistage sampling to selected two districts and the criteria were aging people age over 60 years who resided in two districts. Two hundred thirty seven completed all questionnaires using face to face interview each lasted for 30 minutes. The qualitative data were used by 10 groups for focus group discussion within one and half hour. Statistical used descriptive statistic and correlation. Results, the majority of respondents were females, half of them were in the age group of 60-69 years old, and age average of 70.23 years (SD =7.39). In term of QOL nearly half of them stated that their QOL were moderate level, for four domains of QOL: Three fourth of them rated their physical health moderate, over half of them were moderate on psychological and environmental domains. In contrast, half of them rated poor on social relationship factors. In addition, one third of them had high and moderate depressive symptom, that negative correlation(r=-0.52) with total QOL. In term of ADL, 81.4% were able to perform their daily activities by themselves. For IADL assessment, 18.1% of them could hardly use the telephone and cooking. The perception towards health and social services among aging people were suggested that they had a psychological and social problem, feeling alone and lower of self-efficacy. They stated that they had problems accessing to health care services, and the distance between their home and hospital was quite far. In conclusion, total QOL of aging people were moderate to good that related to perception well-being among aging people in two districts. Moreover, the several factors affects QOL were physical problem or illness and chronic diseases. They had high and moderate prior depression test were affected to their personal health problems, ADL and IADL. This factor affected to aging people that due to surfer on perception of health care and social service for their own.