The purpose of our thesis is to shed light on how the work to meet the psychosocial needs of the elderly is organized in the palliative care in elderly care, and what role and significance the professional social work can have in such an activity. The purpose is concretized in the following question statements; What is the role and responsibility of the caregiver for their caregivers and elderly patients. What strategies does a health care curator use compared to care staff in general palliative care to meet the psychosocial needs of the elderly and what significance can the presence of a health care curator in general palliative care have for the psychosocial support in elderly care.  Our findings was that based on the results, there is a difference in whether the elderly receive palliative care through the specialized palliative care or through the general palliative care. The reason for this could be that the health care curator is not mandatory in the general palliative care and our findings suggest that this could be a contributing factor.  Our conclusions are that regardless of whether the elderly have lived a long life, palliative care must have high quality to meet the ethical standards. According to assistant nurses, what has emerged during the results is above all that more resources are needed for the caregivers to feel sufficient at work and at least have the opportunity to meet psychosocial needs. The interviewees have also pointed out a lack of competence at psychosocial support in the existing medical workforce. Therefore we interpret, based on the results, that it is a health and medical care curator who is needed in the palliative care to be able to ensure a dignified death.

The aim of this study was to examine how care professionals experienced the need of an elder counselor in communal geriatric care. The ambition was to discover how the caregivers viewed the need of an elder counselor to identify and antagonize the suffering from mental illness and loneliness against older people and to reach a greater understanding of what they experience is the opportunities and difficulties with the eldercounselor. The study was conducted through six semi-structured, qualitative interviews with six different home care staff in two municipalities who had counselors provided for the older people living there. We identified six themes in the interviews which were used for analyzing our results. The themes were: Professions treatment of mental illness and loneliness, A support for the care professionals, An anonymous profession, Loneliness and mental illness, Elders need to talk and Elders oppose counselor support. The results of our study shows that it is common that older people suffer from mental illness and loneliness. The care professionals experience that there is a need of having a counselor to support and help their patients to counteract mental illness. The care professionals also experience that the counselors can be used as a support for the care professionals themselves. The results also showed that a lot of the older people were offered professional talk with a counselor but resisted the offer. We also discovered difficulties with the collaboration within the organization between the counselor, the patients and the care staff.