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Working together for a meaningful daily life for older persons: A participatory and appreciative action and reflection project—The lessons we learned

Blog post by Inger James 

An aging population with elderly persons suffering from multiple diseases together with accelerating medico-technical developments is putting increasing pressure on care systems all over the world. To cope with these challenges, it will not be possible to continue working as usual and healthcare systems must improve the integration and coordination of their services to fulfill the needs of current and future elderly persons. Unfortunately, many development efforts in elderly care fail due to the complexity that signifies multi-stakeholder systems. In this paper, however, we get a detailed and in-depth description of a successful participative action research process that invited the key stakeholders in a municipality to agree on core values for the system.

Older people, relatives, politicians, managers, nurses, nurse assistants and others were involved in iterative, appreciative reflection-action loops to jointly adopt core values and guidelines for a meaningful daily life for elderly. These guidelines are now informing the continuous development of the system which now are evaluated. Lessons learned from the process are shared and should be of great value to other efforts that aim to take on these challenges in other contexts.

The results of this research have also started other action research projects in our research environment ‘Older People’s Health and Living Condition’ where we continue to work with older people, their relatives and staff in elderly care; The right to have a security in your own home and Serenity in old age promote mental wellbeing”

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