Quality of Life and Person-Centered Care for Older People (eBook)

This book explores the meaning of quality of life in care for older persons and introduces the reader to their main concerns when receiving care. Based on qualitative research, it pays particular attention to the needs and requirements of older people, considering their individual family situations, social circumstances, values and lifestyles. Person-centred care is a way of providing nursing care that puts older people and their families at the core of all decisions, seeing each person as an individual, and working together to develop appropriate solutions.

Following an introduction to the concept of quality of life in old age, the book reviews essential findings from worldwide research into the experiences of older people with regard to nursing care and the impact of these experiences on their quality of life. It investigates health promotion, care provided in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, and palliative care. Each chapter includes a brief introduction to the respective field of nursing care and the problems it has to deal with, concluding with a discussion of their implications for nursing practice in the respective field of care. In closing, the evidence from qualitative research is discussed in relation to current gerontological theories.

Thomas Boggatz was born in 1962 in Germany and finished his training as a male nurse in 1992. He studied Nursing Education at the Institute of Health and Nursing Science at the Charité, Berlin, Germany, from where he graduated in 2003 as a nurse educator.

From 2005 to 2008, he worked in Egypt to establish a training centre for geriatric care and a home care service in Greater Cairo. In 2010, he received a doctorate in Nursing Science from the Charité, Berlin, Germany, for a thesis about care dependency and care seeking attitudes among older people in Egypt.

He has been teaching nursing science at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg, Austria and is currently a lecturer at the Faculty of Nursing Science at the Philosophical-Theological University Vallendar. He conducted research about quality of life in care settings for older persons and has published a number or research articles, particularly on the topic of geriatric nursing care and quality of life.