Dilemmas about Quality of Life in Older People

Abstract

Currently, the topic of quality of life, hence quality of life in older people is relatively frequent in theory, research, projects and practice. An important dilemma in this area is the absence of a specific and straightforward definition of quality of life, which makes the concept and its use in the practice of helping professions difficult to fulfill. Another dilemma of the topic is the effort to reduce the concept of quality of life to individual domains which may affect certain aspects of quality of life in a broader context, but quality of life cannot be reduced to them. In the paper, we tried to map certain aspects of quality of life in older people which could allow workers in helping professions to comprehensively identify and effectively exploit the broad aspects of domains and factors in reciprocal interconnectedness. The topic of quality of life in older people should be part of the vision of social organizations in the future, their organizational culture, training of workers and part of their daily cooperation with clients. The condition for an organization to focus on quality of life of its clients is to create optimal conditions of quality of life for its workers. The two aspects of quality of life form the communicating vessels bringing about the synergic effect.