ABSTRACT
Just telling staff what care to deliver to older people is unlikely to be an effective foundation for improving services. Older people’s care needs can be diverse and dynamic, requiring the provision of tailored care that can respond to individual needs and changes over time. This responsiveness of care is dependent not just on the skills, knowledge, and values of the healthcare worker at the point of care but also on a range of other factors that shape how staff are able to act and the extent to which they can respond to what that individual patient needs in that moment. Taking a dynamic, ecological systems viewpoint to designing care improvement interventions enables these factors to be identified and targeted where possible, potentially improving the conditions for staff at the point of care to be able to act.
