Over thirty years ago geriatric nursing, as it was then called, was at the
forefront of nursing research in the United Kingdom. Concurrent with
the emergence of geriatric medicine as a distinct speciality, the
pioneering study of Doreen Norton and colleagues (Norton et al. 1962)
served to highlight both the deficits that existed in the hospital care of
older people and the enormous potential of nursing to improve the
situation, particularly for the ‘irremediable’ patient (Norton 1965).
Caring for those who could not be cured but required on-going support
was seen to constitute ‘true nursing’ and was identified as an area of
practice in which nurses should excel (Norton 1965, Wells 1980). Such
potential went largely unrealised, however, as nursing focused on
acute, hospital-based care (Nolan 1994). As a consequence, those
working in continuing care struggled to find value in their work and
patients were subjected to ‘aimless residual care’ (Evers 1991), a
situation exacerbated by the continued application of the biomedical
model (Reed and Watson 1994). Despite claims that nurses working
with older people have ‘special skills’ (Royal
College of Nursing 1993),
the nature of such skills has therefore never fully been explicated.
Indeed, Armstrong-Esther et al. (1994) asked what nurses currently
contribute to the well-being of elderly people and, following their
study, suggested that nurses must take the initiative and expand their
role if ‘we are going to avoid simply warehousing the elderly until they
die’. The need to act is particularly pressing at present as the spectre
of ‘bed-blockers’ emerges once more and there is growing professional
concern that older people may soon be denied the right to receive care
from a qualified nurse (Nursing Times 1996).
Involving older people in gerontological nursing research: A discussion of five European perspectives
