Staff personhood in dementia care settings: “Do they care about me?”

Abstract

Organisations are encouraged to consider creating person-centred management and workplace practices that provide tangible evidence that RCAs, and their work, matter.

The Influence of Care Home Managers’ Leadership on the Delivery of Person-Centred Care for People Living with Dementia: A Systematic Review

“…Data collection methods used were observations and interviews (n � 2), focus groups (n � 5), interviews (n � 5), and questionnaires (n � 9). Six studies were conducted in the UK [35][36][37][38][39][40][41], fve in Norway [42][43][44][45][46], three in Sweden [47][48][49], two in Australia [50,51], two in the Netherlands [52,53], one in the USA [54], one in Canada [55], and one in Germany [56]. Studies in care home settings identifed as nursing homes, residential aged care facilities, and long-term care facilities.…”

“…Te ownership and organisational structure of a care homes afected how care home managers were able to prioritise person-centred approaches to residents' care. Policies and procedures that supported work-life balance (i.e., human resources recognition of stafs' commitments outside the care home and manageable shift patterns) were described as key to the delivery of person-centred care [55]. Te majority of papers reviewed, however, identifed how policies and procedures that did not prioritise residents' care needs afected the ways that staf were supported to deliver person-centred care ( [37,38,40,41,45,50,51,55,56]).…”

“…Four studies identifed that staf relied on care home managers being afrming and supportive [35,47,52,55]. Where this did not happen, staf reported feelings of low self-esteem and a lack of confdence in their role.…”

“…Where this did not happen, staf reported feelings of low self-esteem and a lack of confdence in their role. Low staf morale, absence at work, and stress compounded reported difculties in providing person-centred care to people living with dementia [45,47,48,50,55]. Two UK studies evaluated care home managers implementing a mindful leadership approach [36,37].…”

Exploring the role of external experts in supporting staff to implement psychosocial interventions in care home settings: results from the process evaluation of a randomized controlled trial

“…However, staff may not be adequately prepared to undertake this role, given the low levels of education, training [5], literacy and numeracy among the workforce [6, 7]. Annual turnover rates of 30–50% [8] and inadequate staffing levels [9] can lead to staff burnout and poor morale [10], which impact on capacity and motivation to implement interventions.…”