The elderly’s health conditions as a risk factor to accidents

Abstract

To verify the health status in the elderly who have suffered accidents and treated at a reference hosp ital for emergency care of Ceará, Brazil. This is a cross-se ctional, descriptive study, with quantitative appro ach, developed in an emergency hospital in the city of Fortaleza. For the sample, 182 elderly people were selected. T he data were collected using the BOAS Questionnaire as a tool, e xported to the statistical software STATA ® v.12. Most of the elderly are women (67%); aged between 81 and 90 yea rs (37.4%); have incomplete elementary school (53.3 1%); are widowed (48.3%); have a family income of one to two minimum wages (31.3%); are retired (68%); live with one or two people (48.3%). As for the perception of hea lth, they refer to it as good (37%). Among the heal th problems, fall with fracture/injury and chronic diseases were the most frequent (48.3%). They reported having a great vision (39.5%); good hearing (44.8%); teeth in bad conditi on (79.9%), missing the majority (93.7%). About the presence of clinical depression, it was found that the elder ly had no feeling of loneliness (84.7%); they did n ot want to cry (86.2%); did not feel the life was not worth it (96 %). At the end, they said they felt satisfied with life in general (77.2%). the accidents suffered by the elderly are related to individual factors. These factors are re lated to working life and lack of structure of households and commun ities to meet the protection needs of the populatio n that is increasingly aging in an active mode.