Grant: Project Grant

Care aides (also called personal support workers or nursing assistants) give most of the hands-on care for older adults who live in nursing homes. For example, care aides help these nursing home residents with eating, taking baths and other daily activities. However, care aides often leave some of these tasks undone. This is partly because nursing homes do not have enough care aides to finish all the tasks each day. Yet lack of staff alone does not explain why some tasks are left undone. Researchers found that care aides in nursing homes with good staffing also reported care tasks left undone. Besides having too few care aides to help nursing home residents each day, what other factors can cause care aides to leave tasks undone? How these factors cause tasks to be left undone? What changes can be made to prevent tasks from being left undone? Our study will answer these questions by asking care aides themselves. We will have detailed conversations with about 48 care aides who work in nursing homes in Alberta and British Columbia. We will ask them questions such as: What happened when you left tasks undone? What could have helped you to complete the tasks? We will use the knowledge that we learn from this study to help care aides reduce tasks left undone. We will apply the new knowledge to co-design, with care aides, strategies that they can use at work to avoid leaving tasks undone in daily care for residents. Our long-term goal is to improve the quality of care and quality of life for residents in nursing homes.