Vem tröstar de äldre som lider av ensamhet och psykisk ohälsa? : En kvalitativ studie om hur omvårdnadspersonal ser på behovet av äldrekuratorer inom kommunal äldreomsorg.

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study was to examine how care professionals experienced the need of an elder counselor in communal geriatric care. The ambition was to discover how the caregivers viewed the need of an elder counselor to identify and antagonize the suffering from mental illness and loneliness against older people and to reach a greater understanding of what they experience is the opportunities and difficulties with the eldercounselor. The study was conducted through six semi-structured, qualitative interviews with six different home care staff in two municipalities who had counselors provided for the older people living there. We identified six themes in the interviews which were used for analyzing our results. The themes were: Professions treatment of mental illness and loneliness, A support for the care professionals, An anonymous profession, Loneliness and mental illness, Elders need to talk and Elders oppose counselor support. The results of our study shows that it is common that older people suffer from mental illness and loneliness. The care professionals experience that there is a need of having a counselor to support and help their patients to counteract mental illness. The care professionals also experience that the counselors can be used as a support for the care professionals themselves. The results also showed that a lot of the older people were offered professional talk with a counselor but resisted the offer. We also discovered difficulties with the collaboration within the organization between the counselor, the patients and the care staff.