Abstract
The WHO project for conforming PHC to requirements of all age groups has resulted in publishing a toolkit for age-friendly PHC in 2008. The toolkit included checklists for physical environment and signage properties. This study matched the current physical environment properties of DHA’s PHC Health Centers against WHO’s recommendations. This is a cross sectional descriptive study that included visits to all 12 Primary Health Care Centers in Dubai city during August-September 2016 with the objective to assess the degree of fulfillment of current properties of Health Centers building to the recommendations of WHO as listed in “Age-friendly Primary Health Care Centres Toolkit” [1]. The study found that 81.86% of physical environment properties are matching the recommendation of WHO, while signage matching was 44.6%. The study concluded that most PHC properties have a physical design that met WHO’s recommendations. The two major deviations were accessibility by public transportations and presence of grab bars. Factors that had a significant impact on design were compliance with multiple international and local standards, the availability of private cars, and the availability of wheel chairs. Signage in DHA’s health centers followed a central plan that differed from WHO’s recommendations.
Highlights
Population in Dubai has almost doubled over the last decade from 10,797 (1.25% of total Dubai population) in 2005, to an estimated 59,977 (2.45% of total Dubai population) in 2015 [2]
This study matched the current physical environment properties of Dubai Health Authority (DHA)’s PHC Health Centers against World Health Organization (WHO)’s recommendations. This is a cross sectional descriptive study that included visits to all 12 Primary Health Care Centers in Dubai city during August-September 2016 with the objective to assess the degree of fulfillment of current properties of Health Centers building to the recommendations of WHO as listed in “Age-friendly Primary Health Care Centres Toolkit” [1]
A total of 9,965,632 outpatients visits were recorded during the year of 2015 in Dubai, DHA received 22.2% of them, and half of them were in the primary health care centers, while the other half were in hospitals or specialized centers [3]
Summary
Population in Dubai has almost doubled over the last decade from 10,797 (1.25% of total Dubai population) in 2005, to an estimated 59,977 (2.45% of total Dubai population) in 2015 [2]. Besides being the major source of healthcare for its elderly attendees, 27.5% of these elderly were partially or completely dependent in 3 functions of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) [4] Conformation of these HCs to accommodate the functional disabilities becomes very important. The Department of Ageing and Life Course (ALC) of WHO, has developed a toolkit to assist countries to deal with the peculiarities of elderly people in the setting of PHC [1]. This toolkit is used to assess conformation of current PHC design to the needs of elderly in other countries [5] [6]
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