Regards croisés sur les droits des personnes âgées en établissement médicosocial

The rights of older residents in Swiss nursing homes depend basically on legislation: more precisely, laws concerning adults' and patients' rights. Besides, they are linked to international agreements on human rights. Their application is strongly bound to the way they are perceived and understood by the various people concerned within the caring interaction: the older persons in nursing homes, their relatives and the various professionals who play a role in the therapeutic relationship. This article aims to examine the historic transformations of these rights - both legally and through the subjective meaning given by social actors -. It is about questioning the manners these ethical norms are seen and put into practice by each other. Ethically speaking, considering the different subjective points of view is of great interest. It allows to highlight the various perspectives or expectations of individuals, depending on the way they envision their own rights and duties, as well as those of others. Divergences of views, or potential conflictual situations, must be fully looked into, if one aims to act in an ethical way, respecting everybody's set of values and achieving therapeutic compliance, which could only be profitable to elderly patients. The combination of a historical methodology and a qualitative method with focus groups leads to trace back and to contextualize the main legislative or ethical changes related to the rights of the elderly in nursing homes, while focusing on the way individuals appropriate themselves such transformations.