An older person is in a state of dependency when they are no longer capable of maintaining their autonomy, that is, they cannot deal with daily tasks on their own. So she needs the assistance of other people to do it. This is regulated in Spain by the Dependency Law, which also specifies the degrees of dependency of the elderly, following the criteria established by the Dependency Situation Assessment Scale (BVD).
This system works through a score from 0 to 100. Once the situation and the characteristics of each person have been analyzed, they are classified in one category and another depending on the number of points they have obtained. According to this, it will be part of grade II, grade II or grade III, the latter being the one intended for people with a greater degree of dependency and who need permanent help to function in their day-to-day lives.
In each Autonomous Community there are specialized bodies that will be in charge of assessing each case and establishing a specific degree of dependency. To do so, multiple aspects related to the activities of daily living are taken into account. These are mainly divided into three: basic, instrumental and advanced.
The so-called basic activities of daily life refer to all those actions that are part of a person’s routine tasks. That is, they have to do with her basic needs. Among them are actions such as dressing, eating or grooming. What is measured is the level of autonomy of these elderly people to be able to comply with them, as well as the difficulty or ease with which they do so.
On the other hand, instrumental activities, these are directly related to cognitive and motor activity. These are very varied actions, but they also determine a person’s capacity for independence: shopping, driving, making phone calls.
Thirdly, there are advanced activities, although they are not something that directly affects a person’s autonomy, they do have to do with their social environment and lifestyle. In this scale, the specialists are in charge of analyzing their access to leisure, the role that this person fulfills in social environments or their work or educational activity.
In short, the objective is to study what level of dependency, which can be from mild to total, older people present when carrying out all these activities. Depending on the results, they will obtain a score that, in turn, will classify them in one of the previously mentioned categories of degrees of dependency.
