Promoting Person-Centeredness in Long-Term Care: An Exploratory Study

This study explored how nursing staff promote person-centeredness in long-term care settings. The study used an anthropological free-listing approach to data collection and qualitative content analysis to analyze written self-report descriptions from a convenience sample of Swedish long-term care staff (N = 436). The analyses resulted in four themes that illuminate how nursing staff promote person-centeredness: Promoting Decision Making, Promoting a Meaningful Living, Promoting a Pleasurable Living, and Promoting Personhood. The study contributes to the literature by providing concrete descriptions of how person-centeredness was facilitated by staff in their everyday practice and contributes to move person-centeredness from the philosophical, policy, and conceptual domains toward clinical implementation. The study also suggests that promoting pleasure for residents is a dimension central to person-centeredness and to health-promoting gerontological nursing, and that "small talk" is an emerging nursing phenomenon that deserves more research attention.