Health care providers' subjective understandings of old age: Implications for threatened status in late life

Abstract

The ways in which health care providers subjectively define patients as being old are unexamined and taken-for-granted. Based upon interviews with 42 physicians and nurses, this article identifies three conceptual domains (chronology, poor health status and “old” behaviors) that underlie their subjective definitions of old age. It also examines the meanings and relative importance of these domains. Ultimately, physicians and nurses understand old age as issues of poor health status and physical and mental inactivity. Their understandings of old age as sickness and inactivity can undermine adult status in late life in two ways: (I) they contribute to some providers' erroneous and potentially devastating expectations about the health and behavior of people in late life; and (2) they reinforce some providers' perceptions that the patient role is the appropriate behavioral model for older adults.