Quality Assisted Living: Informing Practice through Research

Considering that seventy-four million baby boomers will be the next generation of assisted living residents, there is a great need to create, sustain, and evaluate quality in these settings. Whereas most books focus on quality of care, this is the only volume to explicitly delve into the lives of those who inhabit assisted living facilities, seeking to understand and evaluate their perceived ideas of what constitutes quality of life.

Quality Assisted Living provides results from a National Institute on Aging-funded study that gathered information from not only residents, but also staff and family members, who are considered experts who can better help us to understand how quality should be conceived and evaluated. The volume addresses the complexities underlying seemingly clear cut issues and provides concrete suggestions for reframing problems in order to find better solutions. Plentiful stories and quotations are used to identity those elements of assisted living that are most conducive to a satisfying quality of life, and address how this research has led to a consideration of quality as a process rather than as a single condition.

Key Features

Employs the views and voices of research participants
Provides down-to-earth and directly applicable results
Written in a language that is accessible to a wide readership
Describes complex social situation within the wall of AL
Examines issues arising from collective living such as regulations, financing and diverse resident needs
Uses real life stories to illustrate key points of the narrative