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Personal Care

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging

  • 57 Accesses

Synonyms

Care for activities of daily living; Self-care

Definition

Personal care for older people refers to hands-on assistance and help with the basic but essential activities of life such as bathing, dressing, using the toilet, and eating. These activities, known as activities of daily living (ADLs), are essential to maintaining people’s personal hygiene, nutrition, and overall quality of life. A distinctive feature of most personal care tasks is the involvement of touching a person’s body in the delivery of help and assistance.

Personal care is conceptually distinguished from domestic help. The latter refers to assistance with routine domestic tasks such as shopping, cooking, housekeeping, doing laundry, taking medication, and managing finances, which are also known as instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs). Personal care is also distinct from nursing care, which requires specialist medical training. Personal care, nursing care, and domestic help belong to the broader...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Care Policy and Evaluation Centre (CPEC), Department of Health Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London, UK

    Bo Hu, Martin Knapp & Raphael Wittenberg

Authors
  1. Bo Hu
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  2. Martin Knapp
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  3. Raphael Wittenberg
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bo Hu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Population Division, UN Dept of Economic Social Affairs Population Division, New York, NY, USA

    Danan Gu

  2. Department of Population Health Sciences, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, USA

    Matthew E. Dupre

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

    Xue Bai

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Hu, B., Knapp, M., Wittenberg, R. (2019). Personal Care. In: Gu, D., Dupre, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_849-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_849-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69892-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69892-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Biomedicine and Life SciencesReference Module Biomedical and Life Sciences

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