"The experiences of older adults from moving into residential long term care. A systematic review of qualitative studies."

Objective & Review Questions The objective of this review is to establish the meaning of moving into long term residential care and the experiences associated with the move. The specific question to be addressed is: What is it like for older people when they make a permanent move from home into residential aged care? CRITERIA FOR CONSIDERING STUDIES FOR THIS REVIEW Types of Participants The review will consider the experiences of older people who have been admitted on a permanent basis to a residential long term care institution. The institution must be one that provides some level of personal or clinical care service and not just board and lodgings. The review will not differentiate between studies involving subsets of older people (eg subsets based on specific morbidities such as dementia, ethnicity, gender or other specific differentiating characteristics). Should the data synthesis and analysis indicate differing results associated with subsets of older people these will be separately reported. The review will be limited to participants who have lived in the residential aged care facility for one year or less as the phenomenon of interest is the experiences associated with the move into the facility. Definition of “older person”. In developed countries there is no consensus as to an age delineator for “old age”. Denton and Spencer comment that the age marker of 65 has been regarded as the commencement of “old age” in developed countries for many years, while Foot and Fisher note that the medical literature commonly uses 70 and the World Health Organisation suggests that the “chronological age of 60 or 65” has been used in developed countries. The use of a specific age is regarded as arbitrary because unlike puberty there is no commonly experienced specific physiologically event to signify the onset of “old age” because ageing is a continuing process experienced differently by different people and the definition often arise out of the establishment of an official retirement age. TRUNCATED AT 350 WORDS