The discussion presented in this volume has been multifaceted, looking at quality of life (QoL) in care-dependent old people in many ways both theoretically and empirically. The main purpose has been to examine the relationship between long-term care and QoL in frail older persons from theoretical, empirical, methodological and practical perspectives. Our key questions were
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1.
What are the determinants of QoL in older people receiving regular formal homecare or living in institutional settings?
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2.
How does formal long-term care contribute to their QoL, and what are the features of a good quality and effective care from the perspectives of the clients and professional care?
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3.
How does care management contribute to good client and professional outcomes, and how could quality management (QoM) be improved by evidence-based performance evaluation?
For a number of reasons the project was quite complex and ambitious. From the outset of the project it was clear that there was a lack of knowledge and scarcity of research on QoL of care-dependent, frail older people. In addition, there was criticism presented in previous studies on the general concept of QoL as not being able to take the situations of frail older people properly into account. Specific models should be developed, so the suggestion in the literature, maybe even models specific for types of care and for the diverse client groups. Thus, there arose a need for the development of theoretical concepts and models, and our basic approach was to favor a unified and generic concept of QoL to be further specified by empirically tested indicators.
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Vaarama, M., Pieper, R., Ljunggren, G., Muurinen, S., Saks, K., Sixsmith, A. (2008). Care-Related Quality of Life: An Overview. In: Vaarama, M., Pieper, R., Sixsmith, A. (eds) Care-Related Quality of Life in Old Age. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-72169-9_14
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