Working together for a meaningful daily life for older persons: A participatory and appreciative action and reflection project—The lessons we learned

Abstract

This interdisciplinary action research project has its background in the Swedish government’s introduction of national guidelines to address deficiencies in elderly care, wherein it gave each municipality the responsibility to formulate its own guidelines. The main purpose is how we successfully involved stakeholders to create and agree on core values and local guarantees of dignity with regard to elderly care. This paper focuses on the choices we made that led to the politicians adopting the guidelines, and we discuss the lessons learned. This project is based on a participatory and appreciative action and reflection approach. We worked with stakeholders, including managers, politicians, older persons, relatives, nurse assistants, nurses, occupational therapists, and organizations for retired persons (n ∼ 386) in elderly care in three phases from 2010 to 2013. Firstly, we cocreated practical knowledge via interviews, focus group discussions, and participated in nurse assistants’ work. Secondly, we trained managers who formulated preliminary core values and guarantees of dignity. Thirdly, we returned to the stakeholders for a critical review. We learned it is possible to manage a project and involve stakeholders in an action research project by having access to scheduled meetings, providing training to managers, and using appreciative intelligence and technical aids.