The relationship between demand and offer in the services for non-self-sufficient elderly people: A research-intervention involving general practitioners, social workers and families

Abstract

The authors present a research-intervention - conducted with the Emotional Text Analysis (ETA) method - commissioned by local administration - in order to explore the emotions experienced by non self-sufficient elderly people, their family members and the health and social services professionals, within the same territory. Audio-recorded and transcribed interviews were carried out in three different corpuses, then the ETA was applied: a corpus consisting of the interviews of the elderly and their families; one consisting of the interviews of the physicians belonging to general medicine services; one consisting of the interviews of the operators belonging to local social services (residential or semi-residential). Then, the different culture of the providers and the culture of assistance services’ users were compared, to identify criteria to project demand-orientated services. The results underlane that there is a demand for clinical psychological intervention for the problems of coexistence posed by aging, besides the intervention dealing exclusively with the diagnosis-treatment-rehabilitation of the elderly individual. The elderly and the family members ask to be supported in the development of collusive skills and sharing interests to get out of feelings of helplessness and familist dynamics; physicians and social workers ask to be helped to develop alternative intervention models to the factification and medicalisation of family problems.