How Stories Can Contribute Toward Quality Improvement in Long-Term Care

It is important to evaluate how residents, their significant others and professional caregivers experience life in a nursing home in order to improve quality of care based on their needs and wishes. Narratives are a promising method to assess this experienced quality of care as they enable a rich understanding, reflection and learning. In the Netherlands, narratives are becoming a more substantial element within the quality improvement cycle of nursing homes. The added value of using narrative methods is that they provide space to share experiences, identify dilemmas in care provision, and provide rich information for quality improvements. The use of narratives in practice, however, can also be challenging as this requires effective guidance on how to learn from this data, incorporation of the narrative method in the organizational structure, and national recognition that narrative data can also be used for accountability. In this article, five Dutch research institutes reflect on the importance, value and challenges of using narratives in nursing homes.