Seniors- Adding Life to Years (SALTY)

Late life is a time when older adults and their caregivers (family and friends) are faced with health and social issues that can impact their well-being. Everyone wants to live well in their final years but this is a challenge, particularly for people in residential long term care settings such as nursing homes. Seniors - Adding Life To Years (SALTY) is a project developed by researchers, care providers, care administrators, policy makers, older adults and their families from across Canada. SALTY aims to add quality to late life for people living in nursing homes and for their caregivers, including family, friends, and volunteers who support their care. SALTY's focus on late life care in nursing homes makes this project unique and urgently needed. Nursing home care in late life is under-researched and undervalued. As a result, care practices, care relationships, effectiveness of innovations, and policy contexts are not well understood. The SALTY team will evaluate promising programs, practices and policies that are being used in nursing homes in four provinces (British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia). We will develop innovative strategies to understand and assess impact on quality of care and quality of life, with the aim of spreading effective approaches within and across jurisdictions. SALTY's research is organized into interrelated streams: Monitor Care Practice, Map Promising Approaches to Care Relationships, Evaluate Innovative Practice, and Examine Policy Context. We give special attention to issues of dementia, gender and underrepresented voices in this research. SALTY directly engages decision makers, knowledge users, residents and their caregivers in developing our research, to keep our research findings relevant to policy and practice and to improving quality of late life for nursing home residents and their caregivers.