The Last Habitat: Living and Dying in Residential Care Facility

Abstract

This article is a part of a larger study regarding the place of dying. Through narrative analysis methods, we strived to obtain rich descriptions and idiosyncratic accounts of the experience of dying in institutional settings, predominately in the nursing home. The quality of the physical environment can impede or greatly enhance the extent to which a disabled older person can remain in his or her own home. Most of long-term care is provided by family members. However, as the condition of the care recipient deteriorates and the stress level of the caregiver increases, the need to supplement the informal care with formal care resources grows. Consequently, frail older adults may be relocated to a residential care facility. In other cases they may be discharged from a hospital to these institutional settings. Nursing homes are considered the last resort for frail, old people. Despite attempts to improve the environment of long-term care settings through “cultural change,” the overriding theme of much of the literature about the nursing home experience is one of rejection, loss, and in some extreme accounts, a “double burial” that equates relocation to a nursing home with a person’s final terminus of life.

Keywords:

• Institutional settings; nursing homes; long-term care; relocation; death