Residential and nursing homes
When people are no longer able to live an independent life at home, they can choose from different services offered by residential and nursing homes. Below you will find an overview of possible work settings for nursing and care professionals in these fields.
When you work in the field of assisted living you want to offer your clients as much support as needed and as much freedom as possible. In assisted living, residents mostly live in their own apartments. As a nursing and care professional you provide residents with the support they need to lead a largely self-determined and autonomous life. Responsibilities include, for example, personal care and hygiene services, mobilisation, and support with medical care.
Nursing and care professionals working in this field mainly deal with mental disorders occurring in elderly people, dementia, and with what is called “delirium and de-escalation management”. The aim is to offer residents the best care possible, support them in crisis situations and help them learn new coping strategies. By doing so, you will provide guidance to your patients in a world that often feels confusing and scary to them. To successfully deliver this type of holistic and person-centred care you will closely cooperate with members of other professions.
As a care assistant you will provide medical/diagnostic/therapeutic care services to clients under the supervision of healthcare professionals. You will help clients to cope with their daily activities and support them with their personal hygiene and diet. You will also promote your clients’ recovery and independence. These tasks require a high level of responsibility and expertise.
As a nursing and care professional working at an inpatient hospice facility you provide qualified and holistic care to people in their last phase of life and to their families. The aim of your work is to maintain and promote patients’ quality of life and enable them to live a self-determined, dignified life to the end. Comprehensive management of symptoms is the top priority in your work.
Nursing and care professionals working in palliative care aim at maintaining residents’ quality of life to the end. This can only be achieved when residents have access to palliative care services from day 1 and not only in the last days of their life. Together with palliative care doctors you will decide regularly and on an individual basis what residents and their families need. In doing so, pain therapy and symptom management will be at the centre of your considerations, as will be any efforts to fulfil people’s wishes at the end of their life.
Basal stimulation® in nursing is a body-oriented nursing and care concept with puts the individual and their body, mind and soul at the centre. Basal stimulation serves to support people with limited perception in a body-oriented, holistic and communicative way. When working in this field, you will tailor your activities to the individual needs of your patients in order to accommodate each person’s level of development. Your goal is to support patients in their perception, communication and movement and to maintain, promote and further develop these skills.
When working in this field, you will support people needing nursing and care in improving their own mobility. Kinaesthetics® deals with people’s movement and movement perception, interpersonal interaction and the importance of movement for life. Having a wide variety of movement options is an essential prerequisite for living a healthy and independent life. One particularly important skill is to be able to specifically adapt your own movement to changing conditions.