Grant: Chair: Gender, Work and Health

Long-term care (LTC) in Canada is a tangled web of contradictions. It is a place no one wants to "end up", but it is desperately needed. Women typically perform the care, but their roles as paid workers, unpaid volunteers, students, and family members spill messily together. Women also comprise nearly three-quarters of the residents, though our legislation and public policies ignore its gendered nature. LTC is meant to provide safe and secure care but our research and that of others have found that it is often filled with violence and over-worked, poorly paid, and poorly trained staff. The best data we have on care for people with Alzheimer's and Dementia has noted the importance of social care, but workers increasingly argue that social care is not possible due to overwork and time constraints. LTC is supposed to support people no longer able to remain in their own homes, but in Ontario it is challenging to get a publicly funded bed -- waitlists can top 18 months -- and once in care, great burdens and stress are often placed on people and their families. It is referred to as a home, but there is little that is home-like in terms of the food or the living accommodations. It is a place that is too often filled with care workers who work in careless conditions. Care work in Canada is treated as an assembly line process, though human needs and human dignity for both the worker and the resident can not be manufactured in the same way that a car is assembled. This program of research, training and knowledge translation aims to contribute to our understandings of the links between the gendered organization of care work and health outcomes for workers. Using surveys, interviews and observations, this research program aims to contribute to the practice environment by offering tools to support worker's health and safety and to the policy environment by contributing gender-sensitive indicators of quality working conditions in LTC