Nursing homes are collective settings and dominated by care routines that may threaten the autonomy and personhood of the individual. A problem is that nursing homes tend to adopt characteristics of the total institution. The aim of this symposium is to discuss and critically evaluate promising policies and practices relating to the goal of Swedish eldercare policies to make nursing homes homelike, private and personalized. The symposium will devote particular attention to the problem of what to regard as “non-institutional” in terms of a presence rather than absence of certain contexts, roles and activities.

Convener and discussant

Håkan Jönson, School of Social Work, Lund University, Sweden, hakan.jonson@soch.lu.se