Friendly visiting as a means of informing homebound senior citizens of health-related community services.

Health-related community services designed for the senior population include delivered and congregate meals, visiting health-aides and nurses, adult day care and telephone and postal checks. Friendly visiting programs may prove helpful in informing homebound senior citizens of these health-related community services. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of friendly visiting as a means of informing homebound senior citizens of health-related community services. Visited homebound seniors were contrasted with homebound controls. Visiting occurred in two forms. One group received visitors from an ongoing friendly visiting program (VISITING AS IS) in their community and a second group received visitors who were specifically trained to convey community referral information (REACH). A control group received no visiting of any kind. All three groups were administered pre- and post-interviews asking their knowledge of eight community services. At the end of the twelve week program, the post-interview means of the two homebound visited groups did differ significantly from the mean of the unvisited controls when contrasts were made using pre-interview scores as the covariate, F(2,78) = 8.19 (p less than .05). The homebound senior citizens visited by the REACH visitors increased their knowledge of services significantly more than the homebound seniors contacted by VISITING AS IS visitors F(1,52) = 7.20 (p less than .01). While the simple act of being visited did lead to increased knowledge at the .05 level, trained visitors were able to convey such information to a greater degree (p less than .01). Awareness of community services can be effectively transmitted by friendly visitors and improved when a program is implemented to train the visitors to meet his goal.