Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Serving Minority Elders In The 21st Century

2000; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1891/1521-0987.2.2.132

1521-0987

May L. Wykle, Amasa B. Ford, Elias J. Guerrero,

Health and Well-being Studies

SERVING MINORITY ELDERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY May L. Wykle, PhD, RN, FAAN and Amasa B. Ford, MD, Editors New York: Springer Publishing, 1999, 340pp., $46.95 (hardcover). Serving Minority Elders in the 21st Century is a multi-authored text that takes its material from a national symposium held in Cleveland, Ohio, at the University Center on Aging and Health at Case Western Reserve University on October 21-22,1996. The purpose of the conference was to increase the body of knowledge about minority elders and, thus, to improve their quality of life. This volume speaks to the elderly of four minority groups residing in the United States: African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian American, and Native American. Edited by Wykle and Ford, the text is divided into three sections: Physical and Functional Health, Mental Health, and Community. The first section reviews the demographics of minority elders as compared to their White peers. The prominent feature from the first five chapters is the marked diversity of the minority elderly which the authors note makes them difficult to study and generalize about. The last two chapters from this section review the health and functional data of minority elders as they relate to osteoporosis and heart disease. Mental health issues of Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and African Americans are addressed in the next section of five chapters; the take home message for this reviewer was the relative absence of the elderly from these therapeutic interventions and processes. The last section highlights resources that seek to address minority elders' lifetime accumulation of poor physical and mental health, using their communities and support systems. This final section suggests that serious consideration must be given to viable options within the community besides institutional care that draw on elders' values for independence and family support. In closing, the authors outline future research directions and issues to be accounted for when undertaking these efforts. EARLY CHAPTERS The chapters have an introduction, main body with supporting findings, conclusions, and bibliographies. While the majority of them are predominately reviews of existing literature and information, three of the chapters are drawn from research undertaken by the authors. The first chapter by Binstock provides a well-written and rich overview of the history of public policies vis-a-vis the elderly in the United States beginning with the enactment of Social Security in 1935. He notes that despite the numerous gains the elderly have made, they are conversely highly dependent on these government polices and programs for their income, health care, long-term care, and other needs. This dependence is even more amplified in the elderly of racial and ethnic groups. Cogently, he details how economic and health status are worse for minority elders than for White elderly because they reflect a series of cumulative lifetime events. Binstock closes with the finding that access and quality of health care continue to remain issues. He cites a positive factor for the future in the use of means-testing for benefits, with the poorer paying less than wealthier elderly persons. Unfortunately, given the current political climate, it is unlikely that future income benefits will become more generous for the poor, including the elderly or minority. The next chapter reviews factors influencing elderly minority health status and utilization of health care. Edmonds suggests that the health care sector will need to incorporate different skills, attitudes, and values to impact positively the elderly minority consumers of health care. She calls for the study of ethnogeriatrics and to understand minority intra-group and inter-group variation. With Asian elders, Yee adds that the issues become more complex due to the heterogeneity of the population. Indeed, the term Asian Pacific Islanders (APIs) is more of a geographic designation and simplifies the marked diversity of the Asian experience in the United States. …