What is it about?
Research on family members in residential long-term care often focuses on what they do, such as visiting, helping, monitoring care or working with staff. We asked a different question: who do family members understand themselves to be when someone close to them lives in a care home? We interviewed seven family members in three Swiss care facilities. They did not see themselves as a generic group of ‘relatives’, but as particular people — a wife, son or daughter — shaped by a shared history. They also described carrying responsibility for the wider care situation, developing a deep but sometimes uneasy connection to the institution, and living with unresolved tensions such as guilt, changed identities and difficult choices. Our findings show that ‘being a relative’ is more than a role. It is a relational and personal way of being.
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Why is it important?
Care homes often approach family members as visitors, informal carers or partners in care. These functional categories can obscure the person behind the function. Our study shows why person-centred care should recognise family members’ own personhood and the specific relationship that brings each person into the care home. In practice, this means acknowledging whether someone is a wife, son or daughter; inviting their knowledge into care planning; making care processes transparent; and creating a culture in which they feel known, expected and welcome. Staff should also recognise that guilt, ambivalence and moral tension may not be problems to solve, but enduring aspects of having someone close living in long-term care.
Perspectives
My main concern in this article is that institutional language can reduce family members to functions such as visitor, informal carer or care partner. The participants’ accounts show that they understand themselves through specific biographical relationships — as a wife, son or daughter — rather than through a generic institutional category. For me, the practical question is therefore not only how care homes can involve relatives, but how they can recognise them as persons in their own right. This requires careful language, transparent care processes, attention to relatives’ relational knowledge and acknowledgement of tensions that professionals cannot simply resolve.
Rouven Brenner
Eastern Switzerland, University of Applied Sciences, School of Health, St. Gallen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: I Am Not a “Relative”: Self-Understanding of Relatives in Residential Long-Term Care – A Reflexive Thematic Analysis, Global Qualitative Nursing Research, July 2026, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/23333936261466865.
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