Seniors: Adding Life to Years (SALTY)
Principal Investigator: Dr. Janet Keefe, Mount Saint Vincent University
Dr. Braedley is one of over 30 researchers, clinicians
and decision-makers involved in this project
About the study
This project addresses the health system’s current failure to secure quality of life and quality of care for older adults living in long term care residences (LTC). Part of this problem can be attributed to a bias in LTC for treatment over care. Despite the fact that LTC is home for many older adults in the last stages of their life journeys, LTC facilities remain highly institutionalized and hospital-like settings. 18 Assumptions about the purpose of LTC may also create barriers to living well in this setting. Ideas and images of LTC facilities organize public and professional approaches to care: LTC facilities equal hospitals, therapeutic institutions, total institutions,19 waystations for the dying elderly, or even warehouses. This has implications for the quality of late life in LTC. SALTY’s work will build a body of evidence on clinical and social approaches that add quality to late life for residents in LTC in different jurisdictions.
We aim to determine how LTC facilities can best provide care in a person’s last days, months and years of life, in terms of both clinical needs and social needs such as support, meaningful engagement and relationships. SALTY seeks to optimize how LTC facilities promote and support what Atul Gawande describes as “a good life to the very end”25 for the older adults in their care.
This study is funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research
PURPOSE OF SALTY: To add quality to late life for people living in residential long term care
SALTY’s program of research is organized in 4 interrelated research Streams. Each Stream applies a different perspective to the late life trajectory in LTC:
| Stream 1 Monitor care practices |
Stream 2 Map care relationships |
Stream 3 Evaluate innovative practice |
Stream 4 Examine policy context |
| What are appropriate approaches to longitudinal monitoring of care quality and outcome measures during late life for older adults in residential LTC facilities? | What are promising relational approaches to care in LTC? How do highly promising approaches to late life in LTC enhance quality care at the level of care relationships? | Can we successfully implement, evaluate and scale an internationally acclaimed care innovation designed to improve end of life care in LTC facilities? | What policies support or offer barriers for promising approaches to quality of late life in LTC? |
Dr Braedley is a member of the team for Stream 2, led By Dr. Tamara Daly (York University) and Dr. Ivy Bourgeault (University of Ottawa).