Document Type : Original Article
Researchers
1 social work Student at the faculty of social sciences, Allameh Tabatabai University
2 Faculty of Social Work, Faculty of Social Sciences, Allameh Tabatabaei University, Tehran, Iran
Ministerial Ethics Committee
With the discovery of the secret of health and hygiene, the chance of increasing human life expectancy has been provided. The world's elderly population aged 60 and above is expected to increase from 900 million (12%) in 2015 to 2 billion (22%) by 2050 (WHO, 2018).
With the increase in the number of elderly people, there is also a possibility of elder abuse. Abandoning an elderly person in the hospital is one of the examples of elder abuse, and such elderly people are in the target group of social workers in medical centers. Although the number of elderly abandonment statistics may be less reported than other types of abuse, after experiencing a lifetime with relatives and social activities as a human being, it can endanger the mental security of the elderly and society more than other types of abuse and cause humiliation of the elderly. Therefore, designing an intervention model for organizing abandoned elderly people will help social workers in medical centers in managing this phenomenon at the hospital level. To achieve this, it seems necessary to take four steps: reviewing research related to intervention in the field of abandoned elderly people, understanding the subjective perception of the elderly about their experience of being abandoned in the hospital as one of the dimensions of elder abuse, understanding the causes of abandonment by families, and understanding the experiences of experts in the field of geriatrics on how to organize abandoned elderly people, which will ultimately enable the design of an intervention model. Therefore, the question arises: what intervention model can social workers design to organize abandoned elderly people in the hospital?