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“It changed everything”: The safe Home care qualitative study of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on home care aides, clients, and managers

BACKGROUND: Home care (HC) services are crucial to the health and social wellbeing of older adults, people with disabilities, and the chronically ill. Although the HC sector is growing rapidly in the USA, there is high job turnover among the HC aide workforce. HC provides an important alternative to...

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Autores principales: Markkanen, Pia, Brouillette, Natalie, Quinn, Margaret, Galligan, Catherine, Sama, Susan, Lindberg, John, Karlsson, Nicole
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8491760/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34610836
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-07076-x
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author Markkanen, Pia
Brouillette, Natalie
Quinn, Margaret
Galligan, Catherine
Sama, Susan
Lindberg, John
Karlsson, Nicole
author_facet Markkanen, Pia
Brouillette, Natalie
Quinn, Margaret
Galligan, Catherine
Sama, Susan
Lindberg, John
Karlsson, Nicole
author_sort Markkanen, Pia
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Home care (HC) services are crucial to the health and social wellbeing of older adults, people with disabilities, and the chronically ill. Although the HC sector is growing rapidly in the USA, there is high job turnover among the HC aide workforce. HC provides an important alternative to facility-based care, yet it has often been overlooked within the larger health care system: most recently, in COVID-19 pandemic planning. The objective of the study was to characterize qualitatively the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on three key HC stakeholders: clients, aides, and agency managers. METHODS: The study included 37 phone interviews conducted during April – November 2020: HC clients (n = 9), aides (n = 16), and agency managers (n = 12). All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Qualitative analysis of the transcripts followed the grounded theory approach. The interview transcriptions were coded line-by-line into hierarchical themes with NVivo 12 software which allowed weighting of themes based on the number of interviews where they were coded. RESULTS: Fear of infection and transmission among HC clients and aides were strong themes. Infection prevention and control became the top priority guiding day-to-day business operations at agencies; sourcing adequate personal protective equipment for staff was the most urgent task. HC aides expressed concerns for their clients who showed signs of depression, due to increased isolation during the pandemic. The disappearance of comforting touch – resulting from physical distancing practices – altered the expression of compassion in the HC aide-client care relationship. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that the pandemic has further increased psychosocial job demands of HC aides. Increased isolation of clients may be contributing to a wider public health problem of elder loneliness and depression. To support the HC stakeholders during the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, for future pandemic planning or other health emergencies, it is important to improve HC aide job retention. This action could also ease the serious care services shortage among the growing population of older adults. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-021-07076-x.
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spelling pubmed-84917602021-10-06 “It changed everything”: The safe Home care qualitative study of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on home care aides, clients, and managers Markkanen, Pia Brouillette, Natalie Quinn, Margaret Galligan, Catherine Sama, Susan Lindberg, John Karlsson, Nicole BMC Health Serv Res Research BACKGROUND: Home care (HC) services are crucial to the health and social wellbeing of older adults, people with disabilities, and the chronically ill. Although the HC sector is growing rapidly in the USA, there is high job turnover among the HC aide workforce. HC provides an important alternative to facility-based care, yet it has often been overlooked within the larger health care system: most recently, in COVID-19 pandemic planning. The objective of the study was to characterize qualitatively the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on three key HC stakeholders: clients, aides, and agency managers. METHODS: The study included 37 phone interviews conducted during April – November 2020: HC clients (n = 9), aides (n = 16), and agency managers (n = 12). All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Qualitative analysis of the transcripts followed the grounded theory approach. The interview transcriptions were coded line-by-line into hierarchical themes with NVivo 12 software which allowed weighting of themes based on the number of interviews where they were coded. RESULTS: Fear of infection and transmission among HC clients and aides were strong themes. Infection prevention and control became the top priority guiding day-to-day business operations at agencies; sourcing adequate personal protective equipment for staff was the most urgent task. HC aides expressed concerns for their clients who showed signs of depression, due to increased isolation during the pandemic. The disappearance of comforting touch – resulting from physical distancing practices – altered the expression of compassion in the HC aide-client care relationship. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that the pandemic has further increased psychosocial job demands of HC aides. Increased isolation of clients may be contributing to a wider public health problem of elder loneliness and depression. To support the HC stakeholders during the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, for future pandemic planning or other health emergencies, it is important to improve HC aide job retention. This action could also ease the serious care services shortage among the growing population of older adults. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-021-07076-x. BioMed Central 2021-10-05 /pmc/articles/PMC8491760/ /pubmed/34610836 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-07076-x Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Markkanen, Pia
Brouillette, Natalie
Quinn, Margaret
Galligan, Catherine
Sama, Susan
Lindberg, John
Karlsson, Nicole
“It changed everything”: The safe Home care qualitative study of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on home care aides, clients, and managers
title “It changed everything”: The safe Home care qualitative study of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on home care aides, clients, and managers
title_full “It changed everything”: The safe Home care qualitative study of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on home care aides, clients, and managers
title_fullStr “It changed everything”: The safe Home care qualitative study of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on home care aides, clients, and managers
title_full_unstemmed “It changed everything”: The safe Home care qualitative study of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on home care aides, clients, and managers
title_short “It changed everything”: The safe Home care qualitative study of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on home care aides, clients, and managers
title_sort “it changed everything”: the safe home care qualitative study of the covid-19 pandemic’s impact on home care aides, clients, and managers
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8491760/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34610836
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-07076-x
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