A sense of home in residential care

TLDR

Moving into a residential care facility demands significant adjustment, and attachment to place is thought to foster a sense of home and preserve self‑identity, aiding successful adaptation to ageing. This study aimed to deepen understanding of the processes and strategies older adults use to create a sense of home within residential care. The study found that a sense of home emerges through strategies linked to attachment to place, space, and beyond the institution, with psychosocial processes—both individual and shared attitudes and beliefs—determining whether residents successfully form such attachments, highlighting the need for nursing interventions to facilitate attachment.

Abstract

Moving into a residential care facility requires a great deal of adjustment to an environment and lifestyle entirely different from that of one's previous life. Attachment to place is believed to help create a sense of home and maintain self‐identity, supporting successful adjustment to contingencies of ageing. The purpose of this study was to deepen our understanding of processes and strategies by which older people create a sense of home in residential care. Our findings show that a sense of home in residential care involves strategies related to three dimensions of the environment – attachment to place, to space and attachment beyond the institution – and that the circumstances under which older people manage or fail in creating attachment, consist of psychosocial processes involving both individual and shared attitudes and beliefs. Assuming that attachment is important to human existence regardless of age, attention must be paid to optimize the circumstances under which attachment is created in residential care, and how nursing interventions can help speed up this process due to the frail and vulnerable state of most older residents.