Browsing by Author "Dintrans, Pablo Villalobos"

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    Institutional care in four Latin American countries: the importance of fostering public information and evaluation strategies
    (2024) Wachholz, Patrick Alexander; Morsch, Patricia; Dintrans, Pablo Villalobos; Barrientos-Calvo, Isabel; Browne, Jorge; Bello-Chavolla, Omar Yaxmehen; Vega, Enrique
    More than 8 million older people in Latin America depend on long -term care (LTC), accounting for 12% of people aged >= 60 years and almost 27% of those aged >= 80. It is crucial to develop sustainable strategies for providing LTC in the area, including institutional care. This special report aims to characterize institutional LTC in four countries (Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica and Mexico), using available information systems, and to identify the strategies adopted to support institutional care in these countries. This narrative review used nationwide, open -access, public data sources to gather demographic estimates and information about institutional LTC coverage and the availability of open -access data for the proportion of people with LTC needs, the number of LTC facilities and the number of residents living in them. These countries have a larger share of older people than the average in Latin America but fewer LTC facilities than required by the demand. National surveys lack standardization in defining disability, LTC and dependency on care. Information about institutional care is mainly fragmented and does not regularly include LTC facilities, their residents and workers. Data are crucial to inform evidence-based decisions to favor prioritization and to support advances in promoting policies around institutional LTC in Latin America. Although information about institutional care in the region is fragmented and insufficient, this paper profiles the four selected countries. It highlights the need for a better structure for datadriven LTC information systems. The lack of information emphasizes the urgency of the need to focus on and encourage research into this topic.
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    Long-term functional ability trajectories and mental health among older people before and after the COVID-19 pandemic onset in Chile
    (SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG, 2023) Cabib, Ignacio; Olea-Duran, Bastian; Dintrans, Pablo Villalobos; Salas, Jorge Browne
    ObjectivesDespite the advances in understanding the complex association between functional abilities and mental health in old age, studies have overlooked two important aspects. First, traditionally, research has employed cross-sectional designs, measuring limitations at a single time point. Second, most gerontological studies on this field have been conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic onset. This study aims to explore the association between diverse long-term functional ability trajectories across late adulthood and old age, and older people's mental health in Chile, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic onset.MethodsWe use data from the population-representative and longitudinal 'Chilean Social Protection Survey', sequence analysis to reconstruct functional ability trajectory types from 2004 to 2018, and bivariate and multivariate analyses to measure their association with depressive symptoms in early 2020 (N = 891) and late 2020 (N = 672). We analyzed four age groups defined by their age at baseline (2004): people aged 46-50, 51-55, 56-60, and 61-65.ResultsOur findings indicate that erratic or equivocal patterns of functional limitations across time (with people transiting back and forth between low and high levels of limitations) show the worst mental health outcomes, both before and after the pandemic onset. Prevalence of people with depression increased after the COVID-19 onset in most groups, being particularly high among those with previous equivocal functional ability trajectories.ConclusionsThe relationship between functional ability trajectories and mental health calls for a new paradigm, moving away from age as the main policy guide, and highlighting the need to adopt strategies to improve population-level functional status as an efficient policy to address the challenges of population aging.