Perte d’autonomie et qualité de vie chez la personne âgée

Abstract

This research work is entitled "Loss of autonomy and quality of life in the elderly". The care of elderly people hospitalized in the geriatric department of the Yaoundé Central Hospital provides information on their functioning and their perceptions of the quality of care offered to them. The challenges posed by aging therefore affect in a very fundamental way the systems of care and support, the public policies that underlie them, and the role of citizens that we must all play. The challenge of this work is complex at first sight, it is necessary to understand, through rehabilitation processes, the physiological, psycho-affective, cognitive and environmental dimensions of the person's personality, with the aim of making him autonomous and adapted to his environment. Thus, from the theorized dimensions of the biopsychosocial approaches of the care and adapted to the elderly person (...), we posed the research question as follows: "How does the loss of autonomy influence the quality of life in the elderly? » To answer this question, we put forward the general hypothesis: "the loss of autonomy leads to a deterioration of the quality of life of the elderly". The realization of this fieldwork led to the operationalization of this HG from which we obtained three research hypotheses formulated as follows: HS1: the degradation of somatic functioning related to aging has an influence on the quality of life of the elderly. HS2: Difficulties in functional automatisms influence quality of life in the elderly. HS3: restrictions in social participation influence quality of life in the elderly. In order to verify these research hypotheses, a field study was conducted on seven (07) elderly subjects hospitalized at the Yaoundé Central Hospital. The data collected through semi-directive interviews and an observation grid were analyzed using the method of psychic content analysis based on the search for the psychological meaning of latent and manifest content. At the end of our analyses, it appears that we can validate that the loss of autonomy has an influence on the quality of life of the elderly hospitalized in the geriatric service of the HCY, an intervention through rehabilitation exercises will significantly improve the quality of life through the reduction of psycho-behavioral disorders of the elderly. We also believe that these results deserve to be deepened theoretically and methodologically, given that this research was carried out in a limited time frame, and consequently, cultural variables were unfortunately not integrated in this analysis. Therefore, we believe that the functional rehabilitation of the elderly in geriatric institutions remains a challenge in the clinical analysis.