Quality of care for frail older adults

Our successes in improving life expectancy has led to increased years of life lived with multimorbidity and dementia with increased support needs. Much of the support given to frail older people is provided by family and informal support networks with significant impact on their physical, psychological, and financial well-being. Demographic and societal changes are reducing the capacity of family to offer this care. Formal home-based, center-based, and long-term/residential/nursing home care services are predominately provided by untrained care staff working under supervision from nursing staff. Difficulties recruiting and retaining these staff is leading to major challenges to meeting the needs of older people (Chenoweth et al., 2010). This volume contains a number of studies focusing on ways to improve care provided by these services for frail older people. The approach underpinning these papers and many perspectives of good quality care for older people is the need to be person-centered where the older person identifies their own goals for care and assessment of need, employing a holistic and strength-based approach incorporating their interests, values, and capacities (Vernooij-Dassen and Moniz-Cook, 2016).