title: Care planning at home: a way to increase the influence of older people?
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Care-planning meetings represent a common method of needs assessment and decision-making practices in elderly care. Older people's influence is an important and required aspect of these practices. This study's objective was to describe and analyse older people's influence on care-planning meetings at home and in hospital.
  
  
  METHODS
  Ten care-planning meetings were audio-recorded in the older people's homes and nine were recorded in hospital. The study is part of a project including a comprehensive continuum-of-care model. A qualitative content analysis was performed.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Care-planning meetings at home appeared to enable older people's involvement in the discussions. Fewer people participated in the meetings at home and there was less parallel talking. Unrelated to the place of the care-planning meeting, the older people were able to influence concerns relating to the amount of care/service and the choice of provider. However, they were not able to influence the way the help should be provided or organised.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Planning care at home indicated an increase in involvement on the part of the older people, but this does not appear to be enough to obtain any real influence. Our findings call for attention to be paid to older people's opportunities to receive care and services according to their individual needs and their potential for influencing their day-to-day provision of care and service.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Health and Care Sciences, Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, SE-405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden; Vårdalinstitutet, Swedish Institute for Health Sciences, Box 187, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden.
authors.forename: Helene
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Berglund
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dunér
authors.forename: Staffan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Blomberg
authors.forename: Karin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kjellgren
keywords: care planning; continuum of care; influence; involvement; older people; qualitative content analysis