The Story as a Quality Instrument: Developing an Instrument for Quality Improvement Based on Narratives of Older Adults Receiving Long-Term Care

Aukelien Scheffelaar,Meriam Janssen,Katrien Luijkx

doi:10.3390/ijerph18052773

Abstract

The individual experiences of older adults in long-term care are broadly recognized as an important source of information for measuring wellbeing and quality of care. Narrative research is a special type of qualitative research to elicit people’s individual, diverse experiences in the context of their lifeworld. Narratives are potentially useful for long-term care improvement as they can provide a rich description of an older adult’s life from their own point of view, including the provided care. Little is known about how narratives can best be collected and used to stimulate learning and quality improvement in long-term care for older adults. The current study takes a theoretical approach to developing a narrative quality instrument for care practice in order to discover the experiences of older adults receiving long-term care. The new narrative quality instrument is based on the available literature describing narrative research methodology. The instrument is deemed promising for practice, as it allows care professionals to collect narratives among older adults in a thorough manner for team reflection in order to improve the quality of care. In the future, the feasibility and usability of the instrument will have to be empirically tested.

Highlights

Trends in western societies have increased the attention paid to the individual needs and preferences of persons receiving care and treatment
The second part of the results presents a schematic overview of the main design elements from the literature that are used as a theoretical basis for the development of a narrative quality instrument
A theoretical approach was adopted in this study to develop and substantiate the narrative quality instrument “The story as a quality instrument”

Summary

Introduction

Trends in western societies have increased the attention paid to the individual needs and preferences of persons receiving care and treatment. Person-centered care prioritizes the wellbeing and quality of life outcomes of service users and families to enable the stakeholders to flourish in care [3]. Emphasis is placed on the ability of care professionals to view and treat older adults as holistic beings, and to contextualize knowledge in the life-world of older adults [3]. Given their experience, older adults receiving care are legitimately positioned to have a say in that care and its evaluation by determining the extent to which their needs and preferences are being met [4].

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion