Families and nursing home placements: a cross-cultural study.

With the aging of many populations, health care workers and families increasingly find themselves jointly involved in situations involving decisions about nursing home placements. How each approaches such situations is affected by beliefs and assumptions about the role of family members in the care of family members and the decision making process. This paper explores the responses of people from four cultural groups living in Australia (Anglo-Celtic Australian, Chinese, Greek, Lebanese) to a critical incident scenario about a Russian family in Australia faced with such a decision. The responses to this scenario were remarkably similar across the four cultural groups. All saw making such a decision as difficult, but the reasons for the difficulty suggest some interesting cross-cultural distinctions. Some groups viewed care of a family member more in terms of a social and role obligation while others addressed it as a personal responsibility. To not care for elderly parents in the home was accompanied by a sense of guilt among some respondents and a sense of public social shame among others. Ambivalence about nursing homes and placing a family member in a nursing home, culture change and cross-generational differences, and roles and role support were other important themes. The results are consistent with other data analysed in conjunction with the Intercultural Interaction Project. The findings from this research suggests a need to examine more closely the beliefs and assumptions associated with nursing home placements and one way to help students and health professionals to do so.