engleski

Digital Technology in the Health Care and Social Care of Older Adults

Currently, there are over 800 thousand citizens older than 65 in the Republic of Croatia and it is to be expected that their share in the total population will continue to grow. Although the government, and public sector institutions are working intensively on the development of digital platforms for providing services to the Croatian citizens, the question of digital inclusion of older adults (65+) is raised. Therefore, the aim of this article is to investigate the role of digital technology in the health and social care and its acceptance by older citizens. The research is conducted in two phases. In the first phase, a literature review covering the field of this research is carried out. Peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers are searched in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) and Scopus database. Next, the advantages and challenges of using digital technologies and digital platforms in the domain of health and social care services for the older adults are analysed and systemized. The results show that digital literacy and economic inequality are often mentioned as obstacles to the wider use of digital technologies in the field of health and social care for the elderly. The results of the analysis are used to design the guidelines for the second phase of this research in which the interview with the focus group "Digital revolution in health and social care" is conducted. Its main objective is to gain an insight in older adults’ acceptance of digital technology and to explore a wide spectrum of their experiences of digital health and social care services provided by the Croatian institutions. To access the participants’ opinion on the research area, a content analysis was carried out on the transcripts from the focus group. According to the focus group participants (the representatives of pensioners' associations, city bodies and state institutions that deal with the problems of social care and health care for the elderly) the most frequently mentioned challenges of using digital technology are: a lack of knowledge on how to use technology (older adults need training and support, a a desire to learn about the use of digital technologies is recognized) ; inequality of access to digital services (a problem was identified in accessing the Internet in rural areas, it is important to support and provide a safe and quality learning environment for this age group) ; digital platforms are too complicated for the elderly to use (its’ graphical interface is poor, the instructions for use are not clear) ; the participants’ exclusion from being able to understand how digital technology (e.g. assistive robots) could assist them decreases their motivation to use it for social or health care purposes. The contribution of this article is twofold: (1) it provides an overview of research topics related to the role of digital technology in the health and social care and its acceptance by the older citizens and (2) the content analysis of focus group transcript confirms the findings of previous researches and points to the fact that the problems and obstacles observed in the Republic of Croatia are very similar to the situation in other countries. Therefore, confirmed good practices can be used to solve the challenges. The representativeness and a relatively small number of selected focus group participants can be considered a limitation of this research. In order to generalize the results of the research, it is suggested to conduct additional focus group interviews with a larger number of participants from different countries of the European Union.

older adults ; digital technology ; health care ; social care ; Republic of Croatia

This research has been conducted within the project "Senior 2030 - Thematic Network for Active Ageing Policy in Croatia" funded by the European Social Fund.