Cross-cultural comparison of long-term care in the United States and Finland: Research done through a short-term study-abroad experience

Abstract

In May 2014, a short-term study-abroad experience was conducted in Finland through a course offered at Indiana State University (ISU). Students and faculty from ISU and Eastern Illinois University participated in the experience, which was created to facilitate a cross-cultural comparison of long-term-care settings in the United States and Finland. With its outstanding system of caring for the health and social needs of its aging populace, Finland is a logical model to examine when considering ways to improve the quality of life for older adults who require care in the United States . Those participating in the course visited a series of long-term-care facilities in the region surrounding Terre Haute, Indiana, then travelled to Lappeenranta, Finland to visit parallel sites. Through limited-participation observation and semistructured interviews, similarities and differences in experiences, educations, and policies affecting long-term care workers in the United States and Finland were identified and are described here.

A national study of nursing homes as learning environments according to undergraduate nursing student’s perspective

“…A renewed interest regarding NHs as clinical learning environments for nursing students has been documented in the past 15 years at both the national (Destrebecq, ) and at the international levels (Cooper et al, ; Kruger et al, ; Lane & Hirst, ; Lea et al, ; Moquin et al, ; Nolet et al, ; Ryan et al, ) after being stigmatised for a long time as a poor setting with a lack of learning opportunities and supervision. This reversed trend towards considering a NH as a worthy clinical placement is mainly associated with the increasing awareness regarding the amount of residents living in NH that will require an increase of about 40% in the nursing staff by 2030 (Gomez‐Batiste et al, ; Kojima, ), but also as a reaction to the lack of placements at the hospital level (Destrebecq, ).…”

“…With the intent of ensuring the expected clinical competences as well as encouraging newly graduates to consider pursuing careers in gerontology nursing, several nursing programmes around the world have designed and developed structured clinical learning experiences in NHs. Several examples can be found in Australia (e.g., Lea et al, 2015;Ryan et al, 2018), Canada (e.g., Moquin, Seneviratne, & Venturato, 2018), USA (e.g., Nolet et al, 2015) and Europe (e.g., Cooper et al, 2017;Nolet et al, 2015); moreover, also transnational projects have been documented (e.g., US/Finland, Kruger et al, 2017). Differently, in the Italian context, only recently long-term facilities have been started to be considered as a setting where clinical placements can be offered during nursing education (Canzan et al, 2017).…”

IoT-Based Image Recognition System for Smart Home-Delivered Meal Services

“…Countries are forced to develop long-term care-related strategic planning and resource reorganization [2]. The rapidly ageing population has been the biggest concern for the Taiwanese government [3].…”