A Systematic Analytical Study about the Effective Criteria on the Life Quality in Nursing Homes

Abstract

Introduction: According to the increase in aging population, studying the life quality and its related factors is important. Due to the various aspects of elderly’s quality of life and many different needs including physical, mental and social, there are a few comprehensive studies in this field. This study aimed to determine the factors affecting the life quality of elderly and its dimensions in nursing homes through a review of total previous studies. Method: The present study has examined fifteen-year researches and studies in Persian and Latin sources, such as scientific databases, information banks of Iranian publications and magazines, engineering journals and design indexed in Science direct, magazines in Taylor & Francis and Springer link websites during all three months of spring 1395 with the selected keywords including nursing home, elderly’s life quality, elderly residence and environmental characteristics of elderly and English phrase “Quality of life & nursing home”. Results: The extracted variables from 58 essays related to the subject via content analysis of earned variables and consultation with experts in the field of elderly architecture were divided into four groups including 12 factors: Physical variables (safety, physical support and rehabilitation), structural-functional variables (environmental and physical fitness, accessibility and comfort), cognitive factors (familiarity with the environment, perceptual security, sensory stimulation, sense of efficacy and psychological support) and sociocultural variables (social protection and confidentiality). Among the four variable groups, researchers emphasize on the following factors in order: cognitive variables (with a frequency of 48.8%), sociocultural variables (21.4%), physical variables (20.8%) and structural-functional variables (9%). Conclusion: The results has shown that many factors affect the life quality of older people in nursing homes and the related factors to the nursing home structure were classified in 12 minor groups and four general variables and also the great magnitude of cognitive variables for researchers and then in an order of sociocultural, physical and structural-functional variables was emphasized. Accordingly it is suggested that cognitive and sociocultural aspects should be considered in a specific way in studies, planning and designing nursing homes in addition to physical and structural variables.