Accomplishing non-institutional meal times in nursing homes

Ambitions to minimize the medicalized/institutional character of meal times in nursing homes often unfolds as ambitions to make them more homelike. An inherent challenge is that the notion of a homelike meal is personal and problematic to import to a collective setting where residents have different views of what a meal time at home should be like. Based on 100 hours of participant observations and interviews at two nursing homes, the aim was to analyze how staff and residents shaped non-institutional meal-situations. Guided by social script theory, findings revealed three meal-situations: 1) the medicalized/institutional-, 2) homelikeand 3) restaurant meal-situation. Although we identified promising practices in creating homelike meal-situations, these had essential difficulties. A promising alternative was the “restaurant meal-script”, i.e. meals that are established outside the context of care, such as a pub evening/Christmas lunch. The analysis shows that the creation of “care-free” meals can be regarded as a staff skill and that meal-situations imported outside of the care context can be fruitful to challenge medicalized/institutional meals.