Health-Related Unmet Needs of Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Nationwide Representative Descriptive Study in Korea

BACKGROUND: South Korea has no official geriatric specialties or subspecialties. Moreover, studies on the unmet needs related to geriatric health problems in older Korean adults are scarce. Therefore, we investigated the unmet needs regarding geriatric health problems among older Korean adults. METHODS: This cross-sectional study included 411 Korean adults aged ≥70 years. We constructed a questionnaire for a field survey that comprised 21 items to understand the geriatric challenges related to the participants’ physicians and the necessity for geriatric physicians to resolve participants’ health problems. We used unweighted numbers (weighted percentages) or mean±standard deviation to describe the characteristics of the study participants for categorical and continuous variables, respectively. RESULTS: This study included a total of 411 men and women. The mean age was 77.6±5.9 years. Among the participants, 88.6% had one or more chronic diseases (mean number of chronic diseases, 2.0±1.3). Of the participants, 32.8% said that their physicians did not spend enough time addressing their problems and only 24.3% felt that their physicians understood geriatric problems well. Of these, 76.2% (n=313) said that geriatricians were required to fulfill their unmet healthcare needs. CONCLUSIONS: The participants reported the need for help from a geriatrician, although most of the participants consulted regular physicians about their health problems. The study results support that geriatricians are needed to improve health services for older adults.