Assessment of Older People's Health and Social Care Needs and ...

improve the quality of life of older people and to preserve their autonomy in the community, In orderto do this, it had three objectives,The first of these objectives was to design a standardised assessment tool for use in the communitywhich would combine health and social profiling since economic status and social status are the bestpredictors of health in older age, It will be important to integrate into assessment tools the conceptsof primary, secondary and tertiary prevention as illustrated in Figure 1. For example primaryprevention applies to the person who needs to go into an influenza programme, secondary preventionto the person with hypertension who needs to be adequately treated to prevent stroke, so that suchpersons don't get the c:iseases which bring them to hospital, take them into the category ofdependency and the ensuing need for comprehensive geriatric assessment.Figure 1:Proactive Assessment•Towards a healthy populationThe STEP group had a secondary objective of reviewing the quality of scientific evidence forscreening and therapy of selected disease groups, for example cardiovascular disease and mentalhealth disease, It has looked at the evidence base for using sympto t' f ". m ques Ions or screening mpnmary care. It has also coined an approach which is unique in that they ha d fi d ', , ve e me a preventivepnmary care Impact factor. This incorporates the screening and prevent'lon of d', Iseases not known tothe assessor, with expert and improved management of existing disease wh'lch' ,, IS an Importantdevelopment. It"also ranks..the.importance'in preventive terms,of d'Iseases such as high,bloodpressure and thiS IS a significant contribution to good preventive care for 0 Ider people,Conference Proceedings