Yasuko Fukaya
Kanto Gakuin University, Japan
Title: The importance of living world communication to elderly people requiring long-term care
Biography
Biography: Yasuko Fukaya
Abstract
In nursing, communication is essential for nursing practice and its importance is well known from the viewpoint of the quality of care. However, in communication studies associated with medical care and nursing, how has the importance been examined? Through overview of the definition and the contents of studies on patient-centered communication as well as therapeutic communication, clinical/medical communication and health communication, it was found that previous communication studies focused on medical needs or nursing needs of patients or users. Communication is regarded as a means to solve the problems related to such needs, of which scheme has been examined and the outcome has been evaluated. The concept underlying this trend is that the aim of communication between health professionals and patients is different from daily conversation. To address patients in acute or chronic stage and people requiring disease prevention and health promotion, these studies are very important indeed. However, for the elderly, especially the persons who are forced to be hospitalized in an institution for long term and the patients in end-of-life, the ideal communication should be examined, taking account of the intention of communication for a human as the social existence. According to our previous studies, the mean speech time of the institutionalized elderly requiring long-term care was as extremely short as four minutes, which seemed that they were alienated from communication. This study describes the actual situation, background and importance of life world communication in the institutionalized elderly in Japan.