Designing for person-centered care in residential care facilities

• Designing for person-centered care in residential care facilitiesAuthors:Nordin S, Dalarna University, Falun, Sweden; Wijk H, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Göteborg, Sweden; McKee K, Dalarna University, Falun, Sweden; Elf M, Dalarna University, Falun, SwedenThe physical environment is a resource for promoting health and wellbeing, and affects people’s behavior and functioning. In residential care facilities for older persons, the physical environment has a particular significance, as with increasing levels of frailty many older people depend on aspects of the environment to compensate for reduced levels of functioning in order to manage their everyday life. A high-quality building design can ensure that a care facility promotes residents’ quality of life and person-centered care. However, methods for evaluating design quality in residential care facilities are lacking, especially methods that adopt a person-centered approach. This paper presents a Swedish version of an instrument developed for the evaluation of residential care facilities in the United Kingdom, The Sheffield Care Environment Assessment Matrix (SCEAM).The Swedish version of the instrument, S-SCEAM consists of 215 items that indicate the presence or absence of building features.  Each item belongs to one of several domains that address important aspects of residents’ quality of life such as community, privacy, physical support, choice and control. The instrument can be applied to different types of care facilities and can be used as a guide when planning and designing new care buildings, to assess existing ones or to evaluate care buildings quantitatively for research purposes. For example, the relationship between design quality and quality of life of residents can be examined statistically.In Sweden, there have been no instruments evaluating residential care facilities, and the knowledge is limited regarding the relationship among the quality of the design, the quality of care and the quality of life of older persons. Evaluating care environments is an important step to achieve evidence based knowledge in this field. In the longer term such knowledge can be brought into policy on housing for frail older people and contribute to enhancing the quality of living environments and life experiences of this vulnerable section of our population.

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Health and Welfare

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