Adding life to years and years to life

…Adding years to life

Everyone at RSL ANZAC Village, a part of RSL LifeCare Narrabeen NSW, believes that despite the inevitability of physical decline due to advanced age, this functional decline can be monitored and where possible impeded through individually designed therapy programs and the availability of high standards of nursing, social and medical care, thus adding years of function to each resident’s life.

Adding life to years…

They also believe they are able to add quality to those years through a supportive, stimulating and safe environment. To ensure residents benefit in terms of both physical therapy and quality of life strategies, an ongoing system of monitoring for both function and quality of life has been incorporated into the activities of residents at RSL ANZAC Village Narabeen and others at RSL LifeCare facilities.

Adding life to years and years to life

In order to monitor the health and life experience of residents in a way that informs practice at RLS ANZAC Village, they have developed a program of evidence gathering that is transferred to practice to ensure that residents can enjoy their lives.  The approach to ‘adding life to years and years to life’ incorporates ideas of positive health and wellness into assessment of residents, making possible a comprehensive approach to evaluation of benefits of interventions geared to maintaining functional ability and enhancing quality of life.  In this program, combined measures of physical capacity and quality of life provide an informed base of management, allied health, nursing and other services to build better practice.

Ongoing measures

Quarterly measure of physical function and quality of life of residents collected since the last quarter of 2006 adds to quantify health status and quality of life focused on ‘wellness’ as well as on close monitoring of functional ability.  Positive health concepts underpin each of the periodic assessment.  In this way they are able to establish a measure of resident benefits derived from interventions geared around maintaining functional ability as well as their concurrent experiences in relation to their quality of life.

Quality of life measures used for this project incorporate broader health status measure to provide an amalgam of subjective and observed assessments about how health, pain and disability impact on life quality.  Psychological well-being has also been included in several measures of quality of life and focus upon the presence or absence of depression and also the effect on quality of life of social networks and social support on life satisfaction and moral.  Satisfaction with services in not included as part of this project.

Resident involvement

All residents included in these assessments are involved in the allied health program.  Physical capacity variables are recorded by the physiotherapist and quality of life assessed against the nine questions.  Ratings are taken directly from residents or measured indirectly through observations of residents’ behaviour.  The results of these measures are distributed to hostels so their aggregate performance against these measures can be known and remedial action takes place if indicated.