På väg in i en annan äldreomsorg? Mellanchefers reflektioner kring gott bemötandearbete

Sammanfattning: Towards a New Eldercare? Middle managers reflections on how to create good service within homes for the elderly. [translated title] For the past twenty years there has been a governing trend of efficiency and privatization of the swedish elder care. These trends have put the elder cares very foundation, it’s purpose, in a tremble. Middle managers within the swedish elder care are struggling to be able to guarantee good service to all of its receivers albeit the lack of its financial resources. This awakes questions about what actually constitutes good service and how the elder care is supposed to be organised to achieve its purpose. The aim of this study was to investigate middle managers reflections on how to create good service within homes for the elderly. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five middle managers at homes for the elderly in five large/middle large cities within a swedish region. Questions were asked such as ”what constitutes good service within elder care?”; ”what formal education should nursing staff have acquired and what other qualifications should the nursing staff pocess in order to be able to achieve this?”; ”what kind of strategies are being used to achieve good service?”. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and coded. Finally these reflections were analyzed from the sociological perspective based on the Risk Society presented by Ulrich Beck. The main conclusion was that formal education is started to be seen as an important mean to achieve good service for the elderly, personal qualifications remains highly valued. Thus a modest strengthening of the professionalization for nursing staff could be recognised. The development could be seen as resulting from the labour markets higher demands on personal qualifications since formal education has devalued as a competitive value. Finally the elder care tended to be organized towards social rather than medical values, a result interpreted as a mean to regain the clients trust after the exposure of wrongs and abuse within elder care.