Following on from Jill’s look at how we can help aged care residents’ lives be more joyful and fulfilling, a new study aims to measure the quality of their lives.
The study is part of a three-year project based at Flinders University’s Caring Futures Institute, a dedicated research centre for the study of self-care and caring solutions.
Researchers from the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, partnering with several aged-care organisations, are working with older people receiving aged-care services to find out what is important for them to have a good quality of life.
The quality of life measure will quantify older people’s preferences, and interviews with older people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities.
Project Manager Dr Claire Hutchinson says,
“One in four older people accessing aged-care services are from CALD backgrounds and we want the final quality of life measure to be meaningful, suitable and acceptable to all older Australians.”
The interviews will help form a model of what good quality of life means to aged-care consumers.
A preference-based quality of life measure will then be developed, producing a scoring system for use in quality-assessment and economic evaluation of aged-care services.
Professor Julie Ratcliffe, one of the project leaders says,
“The ageing of Australia’s population represents a significant challenge for aged care. New methods, techniques and evaluative frameworks are needed to overcome resource constraints while maximising the quality of life and wellbeing of older Australians.”
It’s good to see so many different projects underway aimed at improving the lives of our ageing community.
