Research On The Quality Of Community Care Services For The Elderly With Mild Disability

Community home-based care,as an important support for care service system for the elderly,plays an irreplaceable role in elderly care service industry.With the strike of “silver hair tide”,China becomes an aging society quickly.At present,home-based care cannot completely meet disabled elders' needs.Community home-based care provides multiple services;however,the elderly have different judgment on the quality of community home-based care.How to enhance the quality of community home-based care service so as to meet disabled elders' needs on home-based care,promote the improvement of service quality and supplement the services provided by nursing institute is what the entire society expects.Nowadays,the most widely-used quality assessment application for service quality is based on SERVQUAL.Therefore,taking SERVQUAL as the quality model,the author carries out a research on the expectation and feeling on the quality of home-based care service for the disabled elders in five aspects including tangibility,supportability,responsiveness,reliability and empathy based on the characteristics of the elderly in need of community home-based care.This paper firstly assesses the quality of home-based care service for the elderly by quantitative analysis,and then conducts an in-depth interview with some old people and nurses.By virtue of various research methods,the author explores not only the gap between the elderly's expectation on service and their real feeling,but also the main causes of the gap.The research finds out that the major dimensions resulting in the gap between expectation and real feeling on service are reliability and empathy.Old people generally think that the service provided by the community cannot meet their needs.Staff's professionalization directly influences the quality of care services they provide.The main cause of such problem is that home-based care service institutes and relevant departments do not conduct effective continuing education on care service.Moreover,elderly care service industry does not have a set of normative and effective care service evaluation system and a set of service quality standards.This situation leads to a result that different service institutes and nurses follow different standards.Thus,there is a big difference in old people's feedback on the quality of care service due to staff turnover in institutes and the differences among service institutes.Social work in elderly care service has its unique features in resource integration and humanistic care.Therefore,social work can exploit its advantages in service,management and support.This paper suggests communities to establish an effective support system to improve the quality of care service and narrow the gap between the reality and people's expectation in four aspects including case management,group activity,community support,community advocacy.Furthermore,community should not put emphasis just on tangible hardware facility construction.Only after paying attention to the elder's emotion and feeling,can communities bring them a feeling that they are at “home”,realize humanistic care and close the gap between the disabled elderly's expectation on the quality of home-based service and their real feeling.