Dr Angela Zhang
School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics, University of Adelaide.
I met Mrs Joycei in a residential care facility in Adelaide, South Australia. Mrs Joyce was a resident who had difficulties with walking, and yet followed a daily walking routine. Although she relied on her walker and staff assistance for support, she withstood the pain and made her own efforts to continue to walk. Once, after a painfully slow walk from the dining area back to her room, she told me that she felt at home in the nursing home. Despite her expression of contentment and relief, I could not believe what she said truly conveyed her experience. Given her ailing body, and the long and difficult walk through the corridor of the facility, I was shocked, and I wrote in my fieldnotes: ‘It can’t be true, especially for an elderly lady with terminal cancer who is cared for every hour of the week in a nursing home.’
Good physical health is often thought of as critical to experiencing a sense of living well. The phrase ‘health and wellbeing’ captures this notion and is gaining increasing significance in the arena of health and social care. However, thinking about wellbeing within this framework can be puzzling, given that, in a medical model, health is often considered as the absence of disease. Like Mrs Joyce, older people ordinarily present age-related diseases which are chronic and associated with functional limitations. They often need to move from home into a nursing home, which drastically affects their ways of living as well as their sense of self and being.
Is it possible for aged care residents to experience a sense of wellbeing in the presence of disease and functional decline? In reflecting upon how I felt towards Mrs Joyce’s remark at that time of my fieldwork, I found that I had held the assumption that aged care residents could hardly feel well due to their conditions of being impaired and dependent on institutional care. The moment when Mrs Joyce shared her feelings constituted a pivotal shift in my thinking on the potential for older people to experience a sense of wellbeing and home in nursing homes. This became a turning point leading to fruitful fieldwork from which a book titled, ‘At home in a nursing home: An ethnography of movement and care in Australia’, was produced.
This bookii describes how it was often through the most mundane everyday activities, like changing position from sitting to standing, walking or eating, that residents could, despite their bodily limitations, feel cared for and at home in a nursing home. They need the kind of care that responds to their innermost needs and desires, by generating for them new ways of moving with relative ease. I call this kind of care ‘right care’. The purpose of this book is to help those who care for older people to practise right care by understanding what right care is and how to deliver it for residents’ wellbeing.
i Pseudonym is used for resident participant’s name.
ii Introduction to book: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/ZhangAt
*The views and opinions expressed in Knowledge Blogs are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of ARIIA, Flinders University and/or the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care.