Effectively including the voice of residents in care home design

Abstract

Care home residents are key stakeholders in residential care homes and yet are rarely included in decision making. This study’s objective was to capture the opinions of care home residents and report on their responses to questions regarding care home life. Residents were asked about their views and observations regarding what aspects of the environment were important, why were they important and if the care home environment supported or inhibited their preferred activities in the home. A visual research method was designed to encompass these research questions, acting as an interview-prompt to engage residents. A new ethical consent procedure was also devised for use with care home residents. Residents’ exercised their critical capacities, reporting in detail on ways care home environments enabled or inhibited choice. Participants revealed how loss of autonomy and personal decision-making undermined their identity and adult choice-making abilities. Social interaction was reportedly vital and visitors highly important. Resident-to-resident relationships were difficult. Privacy was essential. The qualitative analyses highlight the ability of residents to not only participate but to also offer solutions to problems they identified. The role design can play to redress environmental deficits is discussed.

Keywords:

• Visual inquiry
• ageing
• vulnerable groups
• inclusion
• user-centred
• care homes

Acknowledgements

We owe a debt of thanks to the care home residents and staff who participated in this research. We thank Ian Harrison, Sara Nevay and Tracy Smith who helped with this project and Norman Alm and Bran Knowles who commented on earlier drafts.

Data access statement

All related research materials and more detailed research results created during this research are openly available from the University of Dundee Institutional Repository, Discovery at https://doi.org/10.15132/10000150

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by RCUK [BESiDE: Built Environment for Social Inclusion in the Digital Economy, RCUK EP/K037293/1 and RCUK Hub: Inclusion in the Digital Economy, RC UK EP/G066019/1]. Google Research Award ‘Identifying and presenting trust-related features in health-directed search results for older users’.

Notes on contributors

Marianne Dee

Marianne Dee is a researcher at the University of Dundee, interested in ageing, accessibility and user-centred studies. She established and managed a research pool of 900 older people willing to participate in research into technologies for older and disabled technology users. Recent work involved interviewing the key stakeholders of care homes.

Vicki L. Hanson

Professor Vicki Hanson is a computer scientist noted for her research on human-computer interaction and accessibility. As Professor and Chair of Inclusive Technologies at the University of Dundee she led multiple efforts related to inclusion of older adults and individuals with disabilities. She is currently Chief Executive Officer of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).