Social Isolation in Older Australians and the Home and Community Care Program

With the exception of childlessness and living alone, these variables made statistically significant strong contributions to predicting objective social isolation and accounted for three quarters of its variance. This strongly indicates that these six variables should be included in measures of objective social isolation. Both dimensions of power had significant negative associations with the three dimensions of social isolation and made statistically significant strong unique contributions to predicting them. In the four HACC projects studied experiences of social isolation decreased, and experiences of power increased, regardless of whether the projects had countering social isolation as their primary purpose and regardless of location in regional or urban areas. It is suggested that the reason for the success of these HACC projects was their community development and community capacity building focus.