BACKGROUND
Care homes for older people are confronted with challenges of changing expectations from residents and their families for better quality of care and adequate staffing. In the past, quality standards in residential care have been set by professionals and have largely focused on non-quality of life/care issues such as the qualifications of staff and the structural standards of premises.
In several EU Member States, both regulators and providers have recently put in place better quality management systems and methods to advance the assessment, measurement and continuous improvement of long-term care services, partially following similar approaches.
AIMS
The objectives of this project were:
- To construct an international framework of standards including a conceptual analysis for quality of life and quality of care and a set o result-oriented indicators to define, measure and assess quality in residential care for older people, based on an exchange of experiences with result-oriented indicators in selected Member States;
- To apply and validate this framework of standards in two ways: by consensus-building and by applying the framework of standards to an existing quality management system for residential care of older people
- To develop guidelines for key stakeholders (management, staff, residents, relatives and regulators) on how to apply the validated framework of result-oriented quality indicators with a view to benchmarking and quality improvement
- To produce a policy brief about benefits and opportunities of result-oriented governance in Member states’ long term care systems
- To disseminate results and cater for further application of the end products
