Efficacy of transmitting hypertension and cardiovascular health information, and promoting BP screening to elderly via youth agents

The prevalence of hypertension, which increases the risk for, among others, cardiovascular and chronic kidney diseases (e.g., Muntner et al., 2014), rises with age. 74% of elderly in Singapore, aged 60 and above, suffer from hypertension (Seow et al., 2015). Despite the risk, 24% and 51.1%, respectively were unaware or suffered from uncontrolled hypertension (Seow et al., 2015). Barriers to hypertension screening include inconvenience to go to medical clinics and misguided perception that there is nothing that could be done upon being diagnosed with a disease (Wee et al., 2016).

Thus, in order to tackle the problems of hypertension awareness and screening, this project proposes to undertake a hypertension and cardiovascular risk awareness program utilizing youth as agents of reverse socialization for the transmission of skills and knowledge in self-screening of blood pressure (BP) to the elderly.

In this program, we will first equip the youth to be proficient in BP knowledge and in performing BP screening using an automatic BP monitor. The youth will then share this knowledge and train the elderly in their families or their community to perform self-BP screening in their homes.

The study will examine the efficacy of sending youth as information agents to their elderly family members (with pre-existing intergenerational bond) versus to the community (with intergenerational bond newly created) in terms of the elderly’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour toward BP screening and management. We will also assess how the intergenerational bonding created through this program could bring about positive changes to the elderly’s mental well-being as well as both youth and elderly’s perception toward intergenerational relationship.

This study’s findings could contribute toward health promotion, hypertension, reverse socialization, and intergenerational sharing research globally. More importantly, the program could provide a scaffold for designing other elderly-centric health promotion programs in Singapore.