Senior citizens under covid -19 in Sri Lanka: lifestyle changes and challenges

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to examine the lifestyle of older people under the circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic and addressed two research questions as: how older people’s lifestyle has changed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and how changes of lifestyle impact the older people. The six case studies were conducted as three with elderly men and three with elderly women while following strict health guidelines, to get the data and the data was analysed using thematic analysis method. The study revealed that lots of changes of elders’ lives have happened due to the Covid-19 pandemic and it also has impacted to change their life a lot. Increasing household work, losing societal responsibilities, losing religious activities, losing leisure time and hobbies were the major changes happening in their lives. When examining the impact of those changes on elders, the study revealed that deterioration of mental and physical health, increasing dependency, and reduced access to the healthcare service were the major impacts identified by the study. Therefore, this study highlights that urgent attention should be focused upon the well-being of the elderly. It is a major responsibility of society to ensure availability of urgent assistance and relevant services to this demographic alongside other vulnerable groups in society. Therefore, several aspects need to be focused on such as referral to essential services, provision of adequate sustenance and necessary medications, priority in the vaccination process as they are in the high risk category, broadcasting of awareness programmes for children or caregivers on the value of psychological support their elders should have specially in this kind of pandemic situations, building-up systems to provide information for the elders etc. These measures will contribute to ensuring elders well-being in such a difficult situation up to some extent.