Themes of the congress
1. Patient and Public involvement (PPI)
The involvement of older persons in nursing care, research and education.
2. Multimorbidity and frailty
Multimorbidity is common in older persons and has many implications for nursing. Frail persons have characteristics like low physical activity, slowed performance, fatigue endurance or unintentional weight loss.
3. Quality of care and patient safety
Patient safety is the cornerstone of high quality of care, and nurses are critical in the processes to prevent harm and adverse events.
4. Patientsystems and informal care
Patients cannot be cared for outside their context. Integrating and involving persons in the direct patient’s network is crucial delivering tailored and effective care to patients, and therefore a major challenge for nurses.
5. Essentials or fundamentals of care
Essentials or fundamentals of care focus at the basis upon which nursing care is delivered, and includes basic care like mobilization, washing and communication.
6. Palliative Care
Focus on providing patients with relief from the symptoms, pain, physical stress, and mental stress of a serious illness.
7. Technology
Use of low and high technology in care for older persons, like disposable washing cloths, movement aids, ICT, robotics, domotics , telemetry, etc.
8. Medication
Older persons often suffer from comorbidity resulting in different therapies polypharmacy, and in dementia care, the use of psychoactive medications is highly prevalent.
9. Education and learning in nursing practice
Education and learning is a key issue to prepare nurses for the future care for older persons: What competences are needed on the different levels and can nursing leaders make the difference? Learning in nursing practice?
10. Cultural issues
Influence of cultural differences in health and nursing care of older people
11. Workforce
Workforce issues become more and more important in care of older people: What minimum levels of expertise and number of staff are needed to provide high quality of care? What are smart and sustainable solutions for care in an ageing society? T-shaped professionals? Future proof nurses?
12. Management
Management is of great influence on the position e.q. autonomy of nurses. Governance and influence of nurses on the management is becoming a big issue.
13. Leadership
Leadership is an important issue for nurses to strenghten their position, to cooperate with others and to deliver the best nursing care.
14. Measurement issues
Developing and using measuring instruments in caring for older people is important for establising high quality care and accountability. are we measuring what we need to know?