Factors Affecting Quality of Life Among the Elderly in Long-Term Care Hospitals.
Hee-Kyung Chang, Cho-Rong Gil, Hye-Jin Kim and 1 others
PMID 33284135WHAT IT FOUND
Depression and care dependency were the strongest links to lower quality of life in 202 elderly inpatients.
Nurse-patient interaction scores did not predict quality of life. Family visits and cognitive status also correlated with well-being in this convenience sample.
Key findings
01Depression and care dependency were statistically significant predictors of quality of life, explaining 26.5% of the variance.
02Nurse-patient interaction showed no significant correlation with quality of life in this sample, contrary to expectations.
03Participants with severe cognitive impairment, higher depression scores, and fewer family visits reported significantly lower quality of life.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPsWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study used a convenience sample from only three hospitals in two cities in South Korea, limiting generalizability to other regions or care systems. A high proportion of participants (66.3%) had severe cognitive impairment, which may have affected the reliability of self-reported measures like the Nurse-Patient Interaction Scale, especially if nurses assisted with completion. The cross-sectional design identifies associations but cannot prove that reducing depression or dependency causes an improvement in quality of life. The model explained only 26.5% of the variance in quality of life, meaning over 70% of the factors influencing quality of life were not captured by the variables studied.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of correlation between nurse-patient interaction and quality of life as evidence that communication skills are unimportant for elderly inpatients. This finding may be an artifact of the high rate of severe cognitive impairment in the sample, which likely compromised the validity of the interaction scale.