Humanised care for elderly people with communication difficulties

This book is aimed at health professionals interested in reflecting on public humanisation policies. It portrays how psychologists working in the humanisation in health programme at a University Hospital contribute to elderly people with chronic illnesses who have difficulty communicating due to pathologies and/or sequelae that prevent them from hearing, speaking and understanding, since psychotherapy is generally based on dialogue. The phenomenological study was based on Carl Rogers' Person-Centred Care, whose criteria can serve as a basis for understanding ageing, communication difficulties, humanistic psychology and humanisation policies, which are the benchmark for humanised psychological care for all people. Ageing is marked by a number of physical, social, cognitive and behavioural changes, which directly affect the individual socially, interfering or not in their condition of autonomy and independence. In this context, there is the relationship between language and communication, whose alterations are perceived in the elderly, such as aphasia, deafness and\or hearing loss.