Job Stress and Job Dissatisfaction of Home Care Workers in the Context of Health Care Restructuring

Abstract

Changes in the social organization of home care work due to health care restructuring have affected the job stress and job dissatisfaction of home care workers. This article reports the results of a survey of 892 employees from three nonprofit home care agencies in a medium-sized city in Ontario, Canada. Survey results are complemented by data from 16 focus groups with 99 employees. For the purposes of this study, home care workers include both office workers (managers, supervisors, coordinators, office support staff, and case managers) and visiting workers (nurses, therapists, and visiting homemakers). Focus group participants indicated that health care restructuring has resulted in organizational change, budget cuts, heavier workloads, job insecurity, loss of organizational support, loss of peer support, and loss of time to provide emotional laboring, or the "caring" aspects of home care work. Analyses of survey data show that organizational change, fear of job loss, heavy workloads, and lack of organizational and peer support lead to increased job stress and decreased levels of job satisfaction.

Associations between Work Intensification, Stress and Job Satisfaction

“…The symptoms of stress scale (Denton et al, 2002b) is the mediating variable in this study. Stress has been studied in medical, behavioural and social science research over the past 60 years, but there are wide discrepancies in the literature on how experts define and operationalize stress, and there are numerous scales to measure stress (Cooper, Dewe and O'Driscoll, 2001).…”

Relationship between Job Dissatisfaction and Physical and Psychological Health among Filipino Immigrants

“…This finding is consistent with previously reported research on job satisfaction in primarily non-immigrant or White samples. Moreover, this study presents findings from a community sample; the majority of previous studies of job dissatisfaction focused on specific occupations, such as nurses, physicians, home care workers, and mental health professionals, and workplaces (Denton, Zeytinoglu, Davies, & Lian, 2002;Evans et al, 2006;Johnson et al, 1995;Ma, Samuels, & Alexander, 2003).…”

How institutions matter for job characteristics, quality and experiences: a comparison of home care work for older people in Australia and Sweden

“…In these studies, policy change involves marketization in some form, often related to the emergence of New Public Management (NPM), which proponents argued would make public services more efficient and effective through the use of practices drawn from the private sector (Christiansen and Laegreid, 2002). Researchers have analyzed the introduction of managed markets in Ontario (Aronson and Neysmith, 2006;Denton et al, 2002) and in England (Rubery and Urwin, 2011), privatization in Japan (Broadbent, 2013), and NPM in the Netherlands (Knijn, 2000), England (Atkinson and Lucas, 2013), Denmark (Dahl, 2009), Norway (Vabø, 2006), and Sweden (Szebehely and Trydegård, 2012). These studies find that NPM involved time-and-task work re-organization or 'taylorization' of home care work, which workers reported made it more difficult to provide high quality care.…”