2012 Awards for Excellence
Article Type: 2012 Awards for Excellence From: Quality in Ageing and Older Adults, Volume 14, Issue 1
The following article was selected for this year's Outstanding Paper Award for Quality in Ageing and Older People
“Right place – wrong person: dignity in the acute care of older people”
Win Tadd and Alex HillmanSchool of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK
Sian Calnan and Mike CalnanSchool of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent, UK
Tony BayerSchool of Medicine, Cardiff University, UK
Simon ReadSchool of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK
This paper reports on an ethnographic study to explore the experience of dignity in the acute care of older people in four acute NHS trusts. It explores the prevalent view that acute care is not the right place for older people and the failure to acknowledge that the largest group of users are the very old, the frail and the dependent, which results in environments that are not friendly to older people generally, and are especially hostile to those with cognitive impairments. Added to this, a culture that is risk averse and defensive, where care is undervalued and where professional accountability and discretion are replaced by standardised checklists, pathways and audits, cultivates the attitude that if an aspect of care can't be measured it doesn't matter. Overall, getting the job done appears to matter more than how the job is done,so that the focus is primarily on the task rather than seeing the person. It describes how the failure of acute trusts to respond to the needs of the majority of their users – older people – results in the failure to provide dignified care and the impact of this on both the quality of care and patient outcomes.
Keywords: Acute care, Dignity, Ethnography, Older people, Patient outcomes
This article originally appeared in Volume 12 Number 1, 2011, pp. 33-43, Quality in Ageing and Older People
The following article was selected for this year's Highly Commended Award
“Working in partnership with family carers: the importance of learning from carers' experiences”
Joy Watkins, Lorely Stanton, Barry Saunders, Gillian Lasocki, Pat Chung and Penny Hibberd
This article originally appeared in Volume 12 Number 2, Quality in Ageing and Older People
Outstanding Reviewer
Dr Fiona PolandUniversity of East Anglia, UK
