Prise en charge des personnes âgées en milieux sanitaire et communautaire dans la ville de Yaoundé

Abstract

The research entitled «care of the elderly in health and community settings in the city of Yaoundé” is intended to be part of innovations in the sociology of health. This research is based on the observation that the multiple indicator cluster survey conducted in 2010 in the rural regions of the center, east and south shows that people over 60 years of age, regardless of gender, are neglected, the second observation made is the existent of a constitution which stipulates that “the nation protects the elderly” as well as texts of the civil code according to which ascendants have a maintenance obligation on descendants. In view of all these observations, we have given ourselves the main objective of our research to show how health and community care of elderly is carried out in the city of Yaoundé, with the main hypothesis of care carried out according to the means and cultures. To do this, we first used the theory of social representations in order to situate the senior in the Cameroonian context, then the systemic analysis which allowed us to analyze the interactions and functioning of organizations caring of elderly and finally the ethnomethodology used in order to identify the challenges and obstacles specific to the care of seniors in Cameroon. This thesis develops themes such as the perceptions of Cameroonian society toward elderly, the mapping of old-age diseases, the publics policies put in place for the care of seniors in Cameroon as well as the challenges and obstacles. It emerges from our analysis that the system of care and social protection for seniors in Cameroon is still timid and encounters difficulties in extending to others horizons because of the lack of funding necessary for the proper functioning of the supervision of this population in particular the quantitative and qualitative lack of trained personnel in the context of their health and community care.