Mary Flatley

The experience of living at home with frailty in old age: A psychosocial qualitative study

BACKGROUND With enhanced longevity, many people in late old age find themselves frail and living at home, often alone. Whilst conceptualisations vary, frailty is often used in clinical practice as a directional term, to refer to older people at particular risk of adverse health outcomes and to organise care. Investigation of the experience of being frail is a complementary and necessary addition to international research endeavours clearly to define, predict and measure frailty. Currently, there is little empirical work exploring how people over time manage being frail. OBJECTIVE The study aimed to understand the experience over time of home-dwelling older people deemed frail, in order to enhance the evidence base for person-centred approaches to frail elder care. DESIGN The study design combined psychosocial narrative approaches and psycho-dynamically informed observation. Data on the experience of 15 frail older people were collected by visiting them up to four times over 17 months. These data were analyzed using psychosocial analytical methods that combined case based in-depth staged analysis of narratives with psycho-dynamically informed interpretations of observational data. SETTING The study was carried out in the homes of the participants; all lived in a socio-economically diverse area of inner London. PARTICIPANTS 15 participants were purposively selected for living at home, being aged 85 or older and regarded as frail by a clinical multi-disciplinary intermediate care team. RESULTS The findings challenge the negative terms in which frailty in older age is viewed in the predominant models. Rather, frailty is understood in terms of potential capacity - a state of imbalance in which people experience accumulated losses whilst working to sustain and perhaps create new connections. CONCLUSION This study suggests that holding together loss and creativity is the ordinary, but nonetheless remarkable, experience of frail older people. For frail older people, the presence of others to engage with their stories, to recognise and value the daily rituals that anchor their experience and to facilitate creative connections is vital if they are to retain capacity and quality of life whilst being frail.

Developing theory and practice: Creation of a Community of Practice through Action Research produced excellence in stroke care

Much emphasis is placed on expert knowledge like evidence-based stroke guidelines, with insufficient attention paid to processes required to translate this into delivery of everyday good care. This paper highlights the worth of creating a Community of Practice (CoP) as a means to achieve this. Drawing on findings from a study conducted in 20002002 of processes involved in establishing a nationally lauded high quality Stroke Unit, it demonstrates how successful development of a new service was linked to creation of a CoP. Recent literature suggests CoPs have a key in implementing evidence-based practice; this study supports this claim whilst revealing for the first time the practical knowledge and skills required to develop this style of working. Findings indicate that participatory and democratic characteristics of Action Research are congruent with the collaborative approach required for developing a CoP. The study is an exemplar of how practitioner researchers can capture learning from changing practice, thus contributing to evidence-based healthcare with theoretical and practical knowledge. Findings are relevant to those developing stroke services globally but also to those interested in evidence-based practice.

Stroke units: the implementation of a complex intervention

Abstract This article reports on selected findings from an action research study that looked at the lessons learnt from setting up a new in-patient stroke service in a London teaching hospital. Key participants in the design and evaluation of this 2-year study included members of the multi-professional stroke team and support staff within the unit, the hospital management team and representatives of patients and carers. Mixed methods (focus groups, indepth interviews, audits, documentary analysis, participant observation field notes) were used to generate data. Findings demonstrated positive change over time with four main themes emerging from the process: building a team; developing practice-based knowledge and skills in stroke; valuing the central role of the nurse in stroke care; and creating an organisational climate for supporting change. The interplay of these non-linear, but interrelated factors is supported by complexity theory, which includes exploration of how the sum of a whole can be more than its constituent parts. Findings are likely to be of interest to practitioners, managers and policy makers interested in supporting change in a learning organisation.