Dignity in care – do we make it in hospices?
An interesting research report on what dignity in care means to older people has been done for Help the Aged by the Picker Institute. Among other things it evaluates a lot of dignity assessment instruments, and contains quotes from older people about what helps them to feel dignified and from service providers.
Here’s a quote about a hospice: ‘I had a terrible argument with the director of [hospice] about whether a hospice was the right thing and I said it wasn’t for me and he ended up saying… “What you’re doing is taking away the rights of my nurses to look after dying people”, which I thought was atrocious’ (recent inpatient)(p.15). I agree with this patient: the patients aren’t there to enable us to care for them how we think is right, we’re there to find out what they want by way of care and provide it.
The report starts from the Help the Aged domains of dignity (from a previous report). The comment about end-of-life care is: ‘Although a number of end-of-life care strategies have been developed, we found few examples of surveys of older people’s experience at the end of their life – other than those addressing common care issues such as involvement in care planning and privacy when being examined. Other surveys explored people’s attitudes towards hypothetical future situations, which may not accurately reflect their attitudes at the actual end of their life’ (p 29).
Well worth looking at.
Magee, H., Parsons, S. and Askham, J. (2008) Measuring Dignity in Care for Older People. A research report for Help the Aged. London: Help the Aged.