Quality of Life and Care in the Nursing Home

摘要

A central component of the international nursing home development agenda is to deliver compassionate care that is evidence informed and directed at optimizing the resident's quality of life (QpL) including end of life experiences. Few would challenge this focus on positive resident centered outcomes, and it is easy to proceed without probing deeper into the complexity of what this really means conceptually, philosophically, and practically. The latest Royal College of Nursing [United Kingdom (UK)] survey, completed in 2012, explored the quality of nursing home care within England and identified 10 persistent challenges to the provision of high quality care. One of these was the system of inspections, which they argued created a management response driven by a compliance agenda to satisfy minimum standard requirements for facility registration rather than a more nuanced consideration of the meaning of resident centered quality and best practice. Such regulatory drivers are not peculiar to the UK.