In Lagos State, lack of policies targeted at serving older adults, limited financial resources, and mismatches with the needs of the ageing patient population and existing resources have been identified as barriers to providing age-friendly health services in its primary health care centres (PHCs), a study has said.
In a new study, researchers said older adults were not always a priority population for care at the PHCs across the state, despite the centrality of the PHC’s role is to provide accessible and affordable care across the lifespan.
The researchers said work is needed to identify and test interventions to overcome these challenges and improve the responsiveness of the PHC system to older adults through the delivery of age-friendly health services in PHCs in Lagos.
The study titled “Barriers and facilitators to the delivery of age-friendly health services in primary health care centres in southwest Nigeria: A qualitative study” in PLoS One involved 13 key informant interviews.
Three-quarters of the participants were female (76.9%) and doctors (76.9%). Almost half (46.1%) were medical officers of health in primary health care centres, while 46.2% belonged to the management category in the primary health care board.
According to the study, the main barriers to the delivery of age-friendly services included the lack of recognition of older adults as a priority population group, the absence of PHC policies targeted to serve older adults specifically, limited training in the care of older adults, a lack of dedicated funding for care services for older adults, and data disaggregated by age to drive decision-making.
Others include health and patient-related factors such as insufficient programming and community-delivered services like home visits; physical buildings are not designed and constructed to serve older adults; PHCs do not access available resources such as the Basic Health Care Provision Fund (BHCPF); low health insurance uptake; and many older adults have limited financial resources.
The researchers in the study identified facilitators to the delivery of age-friendly health services to include an acknowledged mission of the PHCs to provide services for all ages and opportunities for the enhancement of older adult care.
In addition, there was the availability of a new building template that supports facility design, which is more age-friendly; access to basic health care funds; and a positive attitude towards capacity building for the existing workforce.
They declared that with the rising burden of non-communicable diseases among older adults, these conditions might not be adequately addressed in primary health care systems since they are primarily designed for providing acute care, justifying the need for the availability of PHC that focuses on older adults.
They, therefore, recommend that experts actively engage stakeholders and give priority to selecting, co-designing, and implementing interventions that directly address barriers while building on existing strengths to improve the delivery of age-friendly health services in primary health care facilities in Lagos.
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