Publication details
The Front-Line Responses to Crises and Older People in Czechia
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The available international and review studies agree that crises among older people increase the risk of death as a direct result of the event, reduce life expectancy and quality of life, significantly reduce access to health care, and complicate or make impossible the treatment of chronic diseases (diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia), have significant impacts on the mental and physical health of seniors, expose seniors to increased risks of severe infectious diseases, affect the quality of nutrition, and have a number of other impacts on the psychosocial and economic aspects of life in older age. International experience shows that the vulnerability and specific needs of many older people can become a serious challenge to health, survival and wellbeing in different types of crises. The global group “Help Age International” has identified a number of risk factors, including that older men and women are more likely to be victims of crises than their proportion in the population would suggest (e.g. 75% of the victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were aged 60+; 56% of the victims of the 2011 tsunami in Japan were aged 65+; similar proportions have been reported in e.g. reports of forest fire victims in Portugal, or reports of excess mortality in heat waves; and the notorious proportions of older victims in the COVID-19 pandemic, etc.). In our paper, we localize these valuable foreign experiences, i.e. transfer them to culturally, geographically and systemically relevant contexts within the Czech Republic. We describe the process of developing a methodology that builds on multi-source data and offers possible directions for addressing health care “on the frontline”. |
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