The Royal Society of Canada Task Force on COVID-19 was formed in April 2020 to provide evidence-informed perspectives on major societal challenges in response to and recovery from COVID-19. The Task Force established a series of working groups to rapidly develop policy briefings, with the objective of supporting policy makers with evidence to inform their decisions. This paper reports the findings of the COVID-19 Long-Term Care (LTC) working group addressing a preferred future for LTC in Canada, with a specific focus on COVID-19 and the LTC workforce. First, the report addresses the research context and policy environment in Canada’s LTC sector before COVID-19 and then summarizes the existing knowledge base for integrated solutions to challenges that exist in the LTC sector. Second, the report outlines vulnerabilities exposed because of COVID-19, including deficiencies in the LTC sector that contributed to the magnitude of the COVID-19 crisis. This section focuses especially on the characteristics of older adults living in nursing homes, their caregivers, and the physical environment of nursing homes as important contributors to the COVID-19 crisis. Finally, the report articulates principles for action and nine recommendations for action to help solve the workforce crisis in nursing homes.

This article is a review of the approaches published between 1996 and 1999 that have been used to forecast human resource requirements for nursing. Much of the work to date generally does not consider the complex factors that influence health human resources (HHR). They also do not consider the effect of HHR decisions on population health, provider outcomes such as stress, and the cost of a decision made. Supply and demand approaches have dominated. Forecasting is limited, too, by the availability of reliable and valid data bases for examining supply and use of nursing personnel across sectors. Three models--needs based, utilization based, and effective demand based--provide substantially different estimates of future HHR need. The methods of analysis employed for forecasting range from descriptive to predictive and are borrowed from demography, epidemiology, economics, and industrial engineering. Simulation models offer the most promise for the future. The forecasting methods described have demonstrated their accuracy and usefulness for specific situations, but none has proven accurate for long-term forecasting or for estimating needs for large geographical areas or populations.

Background: Organizational context plays a central role in shaping the use of research by healthcare professionals. The largest group of professionals employed in healthcare organizations is nurses, putting them in a position to influence patient and system outcomes significantly. However, investigators have often limited their study on the determinants of research use to individual factors over organizational or contextual factors.

This analysis enhanced understanding of how nurses are portrayed in the media, but it indicated the significance of quality of work life and issues about work-home life. Some descriptions of the care and caring of nurses have made nursing seem like an important and influential profession to potential applicants who might previously have dismissed nursing as a career.