2019 Volume 39 Pages 202-210
Aim: This study aimed to identify actions that nurses take in acute care hospital settings to continue with care for elderly people.
Method: Sixteen nurses participated in semi-structured interviews. Interview data were analyzed using a qualitative synthesis method (KJ method) and then organized into groups representing the targeted nursing actions.
Results: The following six actions were extracted from the interview data. 1) Encourage your healthcare professional team to pay attention to elderly people’s hopes or values based on their everyday interactions. 2) Encourage collaboration between healthcare professionals by sharing information about elderly people from multiple perspectives and discussing possible treatments. 3) Gain a foothold for elderly care by respecting their own way of living and ensuring other healthcare professionals consider elderly people as human beings. 4) Gain a foothold for healthcare professionals’ work by respecting individual specialties and determining their area of responsibility. 5) Control the environment around elderly people by supporting caregivers, adjusting the relationship between an elderly person and his/her caregiver and informing general citizens. 6) Control the environment around healthcare professionals by creating a system to communicate smoothly.
Conclusions: Actions 1) and 2) represent “Encouraging”, actions 3) and 4) represent “Gaining a foothold” and actions 5) and 6) represent “Controlling the environment”. Furthermore, actions 1), 3) and 5) targeted elderly people and actions 2), 4) and 6) targeted healthcare professionals. Therefore, we found two axes of nursing actions: “Encouraging–Gaining a foothold–Controlling the environment” and “Elderly people–Healthcare professionals”.
