Planning a Communication Education Program for Older People

Nominal group technique (Delbecq, Van de Ven, & Gustafson, 1975) was used with seven groups of elderly people and two groups of professionals who work with the aged to determine the communication difficulties that community‐based older people experience and to determine appropriate content for a proposed education program. The older people perceived that their most significant communication problems were hearing difficulties, memory loss, and word retrieval difficulties. The health and welfare professionals had different perceptions about the communication problems of the elderly. Nominal group technique proved to be a valuable tool for identifying the communication needs of the elderly and for developing a health promotion program.