Age-friendly Nursing Care Perceived by Professional Nurses Working in Hospital Wards, Project on Development of Age-friendly Nursing Service System

Abstract

This descriptive study aimed to evaluate the Age-friendly Nursing care as perceived by professional nurses. The sample was the professional nurses under the development of age-friendly project. A total of 337 participants from 9 departments were asked questions using age-friendly nursing care scale developed by Boonsong Hatawaikarn during April- December 2014. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the outcomes. The results showed that: 1) the overall scores of age-friendly nursing care scale were high, the average score was 4.34/5 (standard deviation, SD) = 0.75) where the highest scores were in the areas of attitude and communication, and the respect and right protection of older adults. The other areas; nursing care, age-friendly environment, social and family support in caring older patients during hospitalization were in the high levels; 2) Nurses’ perception regarding age-friendly nursing care classified by department was highest in surgery and orthopedics department with the average scores of 4.52/5 (SD=0.71). The scores of other departments were high. The level of perception influences the quality of age-friendly nursing care. Thus, nursing organization should support more on the development of age-friendly nursing care in order to improve efficiency in geriatric care.