OBJECTIVES: Personalisation/home care is used for people with long-term health conditions to receive support tailored to meet their individual needs. The support received is person centred to ensure independence, having total control/choice of services used daily. There is a shift from taking people to nursing home, as most people prefer to live and die in the comfort of their own homes. To date, no systematic review has examined the effectiveness of personalization. Hence, this systematic review examined the effectiveness of personalisation in older adults.

METHODS:A systematic review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines was undertaken. Databases searched included: Science Direct and Medline (PubMed). Inclusion criteria were older people living in their own homes, receiving home care/rehabilitation/personalisation, and studies published in English language. Exclusion criteria were studies carried out in nursing and or residential homes. The Newcastle-Ottawa scale was used for quality of assessment and a narrative synthesis was carried out.

RESULTS: Search strategy yielded 151 results with titles and abstracts, 128 studies were excluded, the remaining 23 were judged against inclusion and exclusion criteria, following which 15 titles were excluded and remaining 8 were included. Four out of the 8 studies were randomised controlled trials. Older people with mean age ranging from 63 to 82.5 were included in the studies. All the 8 studies showed that quality of life (QoL) of older people receiving personalisation improved significantly with p = 0.001. Only one study examined resource utilisation and reported that personalisation was cost saving.

CONCLUSIONS: The review found evidence of improvement in QoL in older people following personalisation intervention. It also showed that personalisation is cost saving. Practitioners, decision makers and social services are to be aware of these findings as they may help to improve QoL of older people and cost saving.