Quality of Life, Well-Being and Nurse-Patient Interaction in Late Life
A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 September 2022) | Viewed by 11428
Special Issue Editors
Interests: quality-of-life and wellbeing in late life; nurse-patient interaction; health promotion; palliative care; spiritual/existential care; meaning-in-life; self-transcendence; hope; sense of coherence; mental health
Interests: quality-of-life and wellbeing in late life; nurse-patient interaction; compassion; ethics in nursing; palliative care and patient safety; municipal healthcare services.
Interests: quality-of-life and wellbeing in late life; loneliness; nurse-patient interaction; sense of coherence; mental health; social support
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The world is currently facing a shift to an older population—125 million people are now aged 80 years or older. Today, for the first time in history, most people can expect to live into their sixties and beyond. All countries in the world face major challenges to ensure that their health and social systems are ready to make the most of this demographic shift. As people live longer, it is important to ensure that the extra years of life are worth living, despite chronic illnesses. Hence, in the years to come, health-promotive initiatives supporting quality-of-life (QoL) and wellbeing in late life will become ever more important. In this context, late life is understood as older individuals and palliative or terminal patients.
In late life, people experience changes in roles, relationships and living environments that can increase their risk for experiencing social isolation and loneliness—particularly when moving to a care facility. With advancing age, loss of functionality and symptom severity, it is inevitable that people lose connection with their friendship networks and that they find it more difficult to initiate new friendships and to belong to new networks. However, a link between QoL and connectedness is emerging in the literature. Despite old age, chronic diseases, fatigue or frailty, the desire for affiliation and social bonding is an intrinsic human need, also in late life.
Existential issues represent fundamental issues of human life, such as what makes life worth living and how to cope with the finality of life. Difficulties in finding answers to these questions can result in existential suffering and distress. Research has shown that meaning-in-life is significant not only for emotional, social and spiritual wellbeing, but for physical wellbeing as well. The few studies available show the need to talk about existential issues or what is actually on one’s mind. However, these issues have so far received little attention in gerontological and elderly care literature.
This Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) focuses on the current state of knowledge on the links between QoL, wellbeing and nurse–patient interaction in late life. New research papers, reviews, case reports and conference papers are welcome to this Issue. Papers dealing with new approaches to enhance wellbeing and QoL in late life are very welcome.
We will accept manuscripts from different disciplines, including nursing and midwifery, health sciences, psychology, and chaplain/pastoral care, in the form of cross-sectional and intervention studies, literature reviews/meta-analyses and psychometric studies. Here are some examples of topics that could be addressed in this Special Issue, related to the overarching topic of QoL, wellbeing and nurse–patient interaction in late life:
- Loneliness in late life
- Meaning-in-life
- Existential issues in late life
- Dignity in late life
- Spiritual care in late life
- Pastoral care in late life
- Health promotion initiatives in late life
- Municipality care; nursing home residents and/or older home-dwelling individuals
- Experience of social support and wellbeing in late life
- Social support in late life
- Coping in late life
- Transitions in late life
- Caregivers’ experiences of nurse-patient interaction in elderly and/or palliative care
- Quality of care in late life
Prof. Dr. Gorill Haugan
Dr. Siri Andreassen Devik
Prof. Dr. Jorunn Drageset
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- old age
- nursing care
- palliative care
- nurse–patient interaction
- wellbeing
- quality-of-life
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