The Effectiveness of Educational Intervention in the Health Promotion in Elderly people

Background: more than 8% of iran’s populations are elderly. the greatest challenge in this generation is improvement ofhealth and quality of life. so we decided to perform an interventional study with the aim of promoting the health of the elderly.methods: this study was a community interventional in ekbatan complex. subjects were elderly. at first, need assessmentwas done with the participation of 200 elderly by questionnaire. based on the need assessment, we designed the educationalinterventions in different fields such as nutrition, mental health, and exercise and then, we compared the results.results: 0ne hundred elderly participated as interventional group. there were 86% women and 24% of men. almost 59%were in the 60-69 age group. more than ¼ of the subjects were university graduates. pre and post interventional groups werematched in age, education and gender. regarding nutrition, second priority food in women aged 60-69 was rice and after theintervention, it was changed to vegetables (p= 0.05) but in other age groups and in the men’s groups no difference werenoted.aerobic exercises in women has increased after the intervention (p= 0.01). with regards to mental health, life satisfactionamong women under study has increased from 68% to 90% after the intervention (p= 0.01). feeling happy most of the timehas increased from 53% to 83% in women aged 60-69 (p= 0.01) and in men from 64% to 83% (p= 0.05) respectively.conclusion: policymakers should design long-term educational programs to promote the elderly lifestyles.