Leenerts, Teel and Pendleton (2002) looked at ways to promote knowledge about self-care for health promotion in elderly community-dwelling people by developing a model which could be applied in practice, research, and education. They began by doing a search of theoretical and research literature from authors in the United States, Sweden, and Finland, and conducted the search in Medline, CINAHL, and PsycINFO databases using the terms self-care, health promotion, self-concept, self-care ability, and self-care activity. Articles from the last decade relating to self-care and health promotion among community-dwelling elders and providing recommendations for education and practice were selected for analysis.
Based on this literature review, current knowledge about self-care in older community-dwelling people was used to identify essential dimensions of self-care which could be related to health promotion and well-being in aging. These included: internal and external environment, self-care ability, education, self-care activity, and outcomes (357). While this paper explores a lot of the factors which go into successful self-care in community-dwelling elderly people, the findings still point to vast areas of individual differences which need to be considered in dealing with any such individuals, so no generalized solution can be drawn from the work. The researchers give suggestions for dealing with problems in each of the five dimensions identified, and give some specific examples, but they really do not present a way of getting around the fact that the problem must be dealt with on an individual-by-individual basis.
It appears the authors tried to cover too broad a topic, and so the results they achieved were also broad-ranging. Nothing precise was established. No real new knowledge was gained from this work. All the data presented was already available in the literature: this article merely summarized what was there. Thi...