Long-term home care communication with older people in Taiwan: strategies and rationales

Long-term home care communication with older people in Taiwan: strategies and rationales Chin-Hui Chen Working with Older People, Vol. ahead-of-print, No. ahead-of-print, pp.- The demand for long-term home care services has been increasing in Taiwan due to the significant growth of the older population. In order to understand the crucial roles that language and communication play in providing better long-term home care services in Taiwan, this study aims to adopt a gerontological sociolinguistic perspective to investigate how professional care workers communicate with older people in this context.Interviews were conducted with 58 long-term home care workers to identify their communication accommodation strategies for older people, considering their health conditions (dementia), personalities (grumpiness), living status (loneliness) and general principles of long-term home care communication.The study's findings provide practical insights for long-term home care workers to enhance their communication skills while interacting with older people.The results could contribute to improving the quality of care services provided to older people and address their specific communication needs.To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to identify contextually specific communication accommodations to older people in existing literature of gerontological sociolinguistics that addresses language, communication and older age. The salience of the findings in thi...
Source: Working with Older People - Category: Geriatrics Authors: Source Type: research