Home care as reablement or enabling arrangements? An exploration of the precarious dependencies in living with functional decline

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2249582
AutoresMalene Bødker (0000-0003-3162-0133, Center for Healthy Aging Department of Public Health University of Copenhagen Copenhagen Denmark, autor de correspondencia), Ulla Christensen (0000-0001-7797-6640, Section of Social Medicine Department of Public Health University of Copenhagen Copenhagen Denmark), Henriette Langstrup (0000-0002-3346-9396, Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies Department of Public Health University of Copenhagen Copenhagen Denmark)
Año2019
Volumen41
Número7
Páginas1358-1372
Fecha de publicación2019-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSociology of Health & Illness (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0141-9889 • E-ISSN: 1467-9566
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-9566.12946
PMID31020676
OpenAlexW2942306649
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas32

The threat to welfare societies posed by population ageing has urged high-income countries to rethink the provision of social and healthcare services for the ageing population. One widely implemented policy solution is 'reablement': short-term home-based training programmes focusing on re-enabling older people to carry out activities of daily living independently. Drawing on empirical material from multisited ethnographic fieldwork of reablement practices in a Danish municipality we explore how the assumptions about independence embedded in the concept's linguistic parts - 're', 'able' and 'ment' - map onto lives characterised by functional decline. We find that home care applicants: (i) are often too deeply dependent on the capacities of others in order to have their independence restored; (ii) negotiate individual meanings of independence to maintain their identity as able human beings; and (iii) might possibly gain new capacities through reablement, yet these are not individual and stable achievements, but rather temporary effects of the care relations with eldercare professionals. Rather than reablement we, therefore, suggest the term 'enabling arrangements' as more appropriate for capturing independence as a distributed, negotiated and continuous accomplishment. Finally, we discuss the practical and ethical implications of this term

Business · Aging, Elder Care, and Social Issues · Healthcare innovation and challenges · Medicine · Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies · Gerontology