Accompagner l'entrée en EHPAD

Entering into a retirement or nursing home is a major life event for an elderly person. Usually occurring in a situation of emergency, arrival in a nursing home upsets the person's way of life and requires considerable capacities of adaptation. The challenge is to relate two life stages that have widely different functioning and concerns. Using a clinical case, we present an innovative process aiming to instate this new narrative: using a phenomenological approach, an autobiographical method uses the analogy of the tree as medium for the narration. Via the “Three Trees Test”, Mrs X tells her experience of the entering the nursing home and the disruptions this caused. The booklet “Cahier de l'Arbre” accompanying the process enables the different issues to be set out and put into perspective, and the construction of a future that is rapidly validated by her implication in the life of the institution. This case highlights the importance of accompanying entrance into a nursing home and the efficacy of an indirect approach which, adhering closely to the subjective experience of the elderly person, restores him or her as an actor of his or her own history.