[Normalized living--an accident? A study of the Task Force on Normalized Living on nursing homes and group care departments of nursing homes]

Abstract

This article describes a research project in 17 long-stay geriatric wards (13 psychogeriatric nursing homes and 4 special wards in old people's homes), designed to establish the proportion of residents which could be capable of living in experimental, normalized nursing homes. We used an existing group of residents, living in normalized care provisions, that belong to a nursing home in the Netherlands as a reference group. In two ways we tried to answer the research question. First we applied the criteria for selection of the normalized care provisions to our random sample. In the nursing homes, 8.6% of the residents conformed to all requirements. In the old people's homes, this percentage was 10.7%. These requirements are very strict, regarded the fact that in the experimental homes six months after admission only 65% of the inhabitants met all criteria. Second, we tried to establish the overlap between the long-stay geriatric wards and the normalized, experimental care provisions. For this purpose we used the behaviour observation scale 'Observation Psychogeriatrics' (OPG). With regard to their level of impairment, 11.6% of the nursing home residents were comparable to the experimental residents. In the special wards of the old people's homes this percentage was 14.6%. The result of both methods are the same. This study proves, that the experimental homes are a serious alternative, and that the traditional psychogeriatric long-stay wards all contain a number of residents for whom alternative ways of care are possible.