Emma Jelstrup Balkin

Good cancer care is not only about survival, but also ensures strategies for recovery and quality of life [1]. Rehabilitation plays a key role in helping survivors regain physical strength and impr...

Aged care staff in Danish nursing homes feel the pressures of time scarcity acutely. But what does this mean for the well-being of residents? Using the concept "care time" we consider subjective experiences of time to make sense of the multiplicity of temporal experiences in nursing home care. We will show how the temporal structures of a neoliberal institutional care logic is at odds with what residents expect from care time. Finally, drawing on a phenomenological understanding of well-being, we explore how residents' temporal orientation to the present and the past can be drawn on to enhance well-being.

Ideas of well-being in old age are often anchored in the successful ageing paradigm, foregrounding independence, activeness and autonomy. However, for those oldest old living in nursing homes, these goals are largely out of reach. In this article, we use the meta-ethnographic method to explore and reinterpret existing findings on the ways in which well-being is experienced (or not) by the oldest old in institutional care settings. We frame our findings in existential well-being theory, which understands wellbeing as a sense of ‘dwelling-mobility’. Our analysis resulted in the following themes: (a) institutionalisation as both restrictive and liberating; (b) reciprocity and mattering: the importance of being seen; (c) the need for kinship and the problem of ruptured sociality; (d) rethinking agency: situated, delegated and supported; and (e) lowered expectations: receiving care is not a passive act. We conclude that while institutional care environments are not always conducive to well-being, this does not have to be so. By shifting our focus from successful ageing ideals onto relationally situated care practices, a possibility for existential well-being opens up, even in situations of decline and care dependency.