Background: An interdisciplinary team-based approach in nursing homes has been suggested in the literature as a strategy for delaying functional decline in residents. Function-focused care is a philosophy-based approach in which interdisciplinary practitioners assess functional capacity and help older adults to optimize and maintain their remaining abilities.
Purpose: This study explored and described the shared subjective frames of interdisciplinary practitioners as regards function-focused care for nursing home residents.
Methods: Q-methodology was used to analyze the subjectivity of each factor of function-focused care for nursing home residents. Data were collected from August to September 2016. Thirty-four Q-statements were selected and scored by the 30 interdisciplinary practitioners on a 9-point scale with a normal distribution. Data were analyzed using the PQ Method 2.33 program.
Results: The results revealed four factors of function-focused care, including (a) using a wait-and-see approach to encourage self-care, (b) maintaining interactive communications to identify and respond to changes, (c) reinforcing residents' inner and outer strengths for homeostasis, and (d) using a tailored approach based on comparisons between the past and the present. Shared subjectivity may provide an important collaborative framework to identify and solve complex problems related to the functional needs of nursing home residents.
Conclusions: The results of this study elucidate the subjectivities of interdisciplinary practitioners and better enable their provision of effective care in support of the remaining functional abilities of older adults living in nursing homes. The findings may be used as a reference to establish communication methods and shared documentation for interdisciplinary practitioners in nursing homes and construct interdisciplinary function-focused care practice guidelines.