Healthy Diet Communication for Older Persons

Status: Ongoing

Defeng Village, Xingning Luogang Town, Meizhou City, Guangdong Province, Mainland China China

Print this page City population: 61910% over 60Practice started in 2023

Summary

China is a developing country with a rural population of over 500 million. Defeng Village, Luogang Town, Guangdong Province is an underdeveloped region in China. 80% of the young and middle-aged population go out to work, and remaining population is predominantly older persons.

A survey found that older persons in Defeng Village have limited capacity to consume a nutritious diet due to the degeneration of their teeth and digestive functions. Additionally, some older people, influenced by traditional food culture, have long preferred pickled, high-oil, and high-salt foods and lack awareness of how to consume a balanced diet. Many older people in the Village have only primary school education, limited health literacy and reading and writing skills, and have great difficulty in fully understanding written health materials.

The Healthy Diet Communication project fully considers the education level of local older persons and develops infographics to visualize hypertension, diabetes, high blood lipids, high uric acid, and daily meals for older persons. Participatory design was carried out with the target group of older persons, and the visual effects of the design were judged based on comprehensibility, readability, and cultural sensitivity.

The direct impact of vision on human behavior is a controversial and complex topic. In this design, positive information frames were shown to have a greater impact on older people with limited education and literacy. The final image has increased the awareness and attention of rural older persons to dietary health to a certain extent. The lesson from this project is that infographics should be used in conjunction with written or verbal explanations that help clarify the image and convey the complete message.

Key facts

Main target group: Older people with chronic health conditions or disability

Sector(s): Health, Information and communication

Desired outcome for older people:
Learn, grow and make decisions

Other issues the Age-friendly practice aims to address:

Accessibility
Ageing in place

Contact details

Name: Gan, Wei

Email address: ganwei@gdut.edu.cn

Preferred language(s): English

Age-friendly practice in detail (click to expand):

Engaging the wider community

Project lead: Research institution

Others involved in the project:

Civil Society Organisation
Social or health care provider
Volunteers

How collaboration worked: The project is funded by the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fund of the Ministry of Education of China and the Humanities and Social Sciences Planning Fund of Guangdong Province of China. The funds are managed by the Finance Department of Guangdong University of Technology.

Older people’s involvement: Older people were involved in the age-friendly practice at multiple or all stages

Details on older people’s involvement: During the research process, we invited a group of older people with chronic diseases to evaluate and provide revision suggestions after the first version of the design was developed. This process was repeated three times.

Moving forward

Has the impact of this age-friendly practice been analysed: No

Do you plan to evaluate your age-friendly practice? Yes

Feedback:
Most older people involved in the project were very positive and wanted to learn about healthy eating. However, some of them had misunderstandings about healthy eating, questioned the scientific nature of the information, refused to learn more about chronic diseases, and even held fatalistic views. The researchers needed to gain the trust of research participants first, patiently explain the hazards of chronic diseases, guide them to gradually cooperate, and answer our questions. The final design drawings were distributed by the project team to older persons in the village, some of whom posted them in their living rooms, some in their bedrooms or kitchens.

Expansion plans:
Yes, China is currently promoting the Healthy China 2030 Plan and the National Nutrition Plan（2017-2030）to improve residents’ dietary. In this context, this project plans to work with communities in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province to reach older persons in urban environments with chronic diseases, test and expand the effectiveness and application of the healthy diet map.

Looking back

Reflections:
Health communication based on group culture can make health a shared value and improve the health equity of the population. In this project, researchers went deep into the daily life scenes of older persons. Their living rooms were hung with portraits of Mao Zedong, Buddha statues for wealth, and Spring Festival couplets for blessing. These are beliefs and customs that have been passed down for thousands of years in China. This also suggests that we can consider conveying health information to them in the form of New Year paintings and couplets. Judging from the reading and calculation abilities of older persons, digital communication and mass television communication are difficult to form a long-term intervention effect. We believe that health information should be disseminated in their living spaces in a way that can be stored for a long time through pictograms and a small amount of text, in the form of paper media.

Challenges:
The biggest challenge comes from the huge differences in health literacy and visual literacy amongst older persons. Even if the objects in the picture are easy to identify, the picture may not be interpreted as the same concept by all people. To address this problem, this project is a collaboration between professional information designers, health service providers, and target groups to fully understand how the target group processes visual information as much as possible, and to allow the target group to participate in all stages of design and evaluation. In addition, in order to further understand the effect of the healthy diet infographic, it is necessary to follow up and revisit the target group in the pilot area after 1 month and half a year to obtain the effect of the visual picture intervention, and to make targeted adjustments and improvements as much as possible.