The Concept of Quality of Long-Term Care

Abstract

To study quality of care (as well as quality of life) in a cross-national research design requires the use of some pre-defined criteria on what is or what is not good quality. This is not easy as on the one hand, quality of care has been defined in many ways, and on the other, the quality of long-term care of older people is weakly defined. Further, the definitions of quality of care from the perspectives of the clients are rare (e.g. Baldock & Hadlow, 2002; Bowling, 1997), and same regards definitions of quality from a multi-professional perspective (Nies & Berman, 2004). Regarding the quality of long-term care of older people, homecare seems to lack quality definitions (e.g. Paljarvi, Rissanen, & Sinkkonen, 2003; Thome, Dykes, & Rahm Hallberg, 2003), more often than nursing care and institutional care (e.g. Ranz, Zwygart-Stauffacher, & Popejoy, 1999). In health care, the definition given by Donabedian (1969, 1980) is a widely accepted framework to evaluate quality of care. According to this model, the quality of (health) care needs to be ensured in the three following aspects: