Brukare eller äldre – hur ska äldre personer kallas inom vård och omsorg?
Service User or Elderly – How Should Older People be Called in Health and Social Care?

Summary/Abstract: What terms to use of older people is a theme that has been studied at different times and from different perspectives. However, not so many studies have focused on the norms of nurses’ professional language in language minority context, in this case Swedish-Speakers in Finland. I focus on the terms care workers use, how they justify the use of terms, and how the use of them corresponds to the recommendations of term use in professional terminologies. The results show that the terms that care workers use are included in professional terminologies. The three terms that the care workers use during the interviews but do not explicitly say they use are the Swedish words minnessjuk (a person with dementia), tant (old lady) and åldring (old person). They are more colloquial and could conceivably evoke negative associations. Future research should focus on what terms nurses say they use and what terms they actually use in a language minority context.

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