A Review of Facilities Management Guidelines for the Living Environment of the Elderly

The population of elderly people is significantly increasing across different parts of the world. In fact, it is estimated that the number of elderly people in the world will exceed the number of children in 2022. Due to the increasing number of cases of decline in the health of the elderly, there will be increased demand for special additional facilities to enable them to maintain their independence in the living environment. To understand the needs of the elderly, there is the need to identify the basic and special facilities required by the elderly in their living environment. Therefore, this study seeks to identify the facilities management (FM) needs of the elderly and the corresponding guidelines for different countries across the world. A comprehensive literature search was conducted to identify the FM guidelines for residential apartments of the elderly in different countries of the world. The FM guidelines were assessed to understand the basic and special needs for the comfort of the elderly in their living environment, while content analysis of the guidelines was conducted and presented under three different categories identified in literature namely space management, building services and supporting facilities. The studyreveals that many of the suggested FM components in the guidelines were general needs of disabled individuals without adequate consideration of the specific health needs of the elderly. The study recommends that a comprehensive anthropometric measurement of different elderly groups is conducted in order to provide detailed FM guidelines for meeting both the basic and special needs of the elderly in the living environment.