Background: There is a move towards the provision of rehabilitation for older people in their homes. It is essential to ensure that rehabilitation services promote independence of older people.
Aim: The aim of the study was to explore multidisciplinary teams' experiences of home rehabilitation for older people.
Methods: Five focus groups were conducted with multidisciplinary teams based in a municipality in Sweden, covering seven different professions. In total, 28 participants volunteered to participate in these interviews. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed according to content analysis.
Results: Two main categories, as well as four subcategories, emerged. The first main category, having a rehabilitative approach in everyday life, consisted of the subcategories: ‘giving ‘hands-off’ support’ and ‘being in a home environment’. The second main category, working across professional boundaries, consisted of the subcategories: ‘coordinating resources’ and ‘learning from each other’.
Conclusion: Common goals, communication skills and role understanding contributed to facilitating the teams' performances of rehabilitation. A potential benefit of home rehabilitation, because the older person is in a familiar environment, is to work a rehabilitative approach into each individual's activity in their everyday life in order to meet their specific needs. At an organisational level, there is a need for developing services to further support older people's psychosocial needs during rehabilitation.
Implications for practice: Team performance towards an individual's rehabilitation should come from an emerged whole and not only from the performance of a specific professional approach depending on the traditional role of each profession. A rehabilitative approach is based on ‘hands-off’ support in order to incorporate an individual's everyday activities as a part of their rehabilitation.
2014. Vol. 9, no 1, p. 25-33
Focus group, Home rehabilitation, Multidisciplinary team, Municipality, Older people