Biståndshandläggare om möten med sent-i-livet-invandrade äldre – inblick i hur en institutionell kategori skapas

Care managers on need assessment with late-in-life immigrants: insights into how an institutional category is created Research on the implications of cross-cultural interaction for needs assessment practice is scarce. This is particularly the case when it comes to research on care management within elderly care. There is therefore a need to explore the ways in which care managers regard and experience cross-cultural interaction when assessing older people’s needs prior to granting access to elderly care services. This article is based on a project that aimed to explore just that through focus group interviews with care managers (n=60) who work within the context of Swedish elderly care. The analysis presented here addresses the ways through which an institutional category is created as care managers discuss the kind of cross-cultural interaction that they find the most challenging (which is the one involving older people who migrated late, do not speak Swedish and come from cultures that are deemed to be too different). The analysis discloses the underlying assumptions about Otherness that the care managers alluded to when sharing their views on, and experiences of, assessing needs by way of cross-cultural interaction with late-in-life immigrants. The article discusses the implications that these findings have for care management practice in Sweden considering that the legislation dictates that care managers need to attend to older people’s “uniqueness”. The analysis reveals that the uniqueness associated with certain client categories is too unique to cater for