Nurse-Led Goal Setting Activities to Enhance Older Adult Health Care and Self-Advocacy

This research project explored nurse-led health goal setting activities in residents living in low-income and other residential senior housing communities.

As part of home visit clinical experiences, student nurses met with residents 3+ times to establish health goals, discuss goal progress and identify goal types, goal-achieving rewards and barriers/facilitators to goal attainment.

Themes emerged from identified goals: Getting Around, Maintaining and Regaining Health, Living as an Independent Adult and Relationships and Purpose. Rewards for achieving goals yielded themes: Feel Better About Myself; Sense of Accomplishment; I am in Control and Remain Independent. Barriers and facilitators to meeting goals were identified.

Findings from this study support prior findings of concerns facing older adults as identified by the Age Friendly Health Systems initiative, co-developed by The John A. Hartford Foundation, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA).