‘We just have to make it work’: a qualitative study on assistant nurses’ experiences of patient safety performance in home care services using forum play scenarios

OBJECTIVE: Safety is essential to support independent living among the rising number of people with long-term healthcare and social care needs. Safety performance in home care leans heavily on the capacity of unlicensed staff to respond to problems and changes in the older patients’ functioning and health. The aim of this study is to explore assistant nurses’ adaptive responses to everyday work to ensure safe care in the home care context. DESIGN: A qualitative approach using the drama-based learning and reflection technique forum play with subsequent group interviews. The audio-recorded interviews were transcribed and analysed with thematic analysis. SETTING: Home care services organisations providing care to older people in their private homes in two municipalities in southern Sweden. PARTICIPANTS: Purposeful sampling of 24 assistant nurses and three managers from municipal home care services and a local geriatric hospital clinic. RESULTS: Home care workers’ adaptive responses to provide safe home care were driven by an ambition to ‘make it work in the best interests of the person’ by adjusting to and accommodating care recipient needs and making autonomous decisions that expanded the room for manoeuvrability, while weighing risks of a trade-off between care standards and the benefits for the community-dwelling older people’s independent living. Adaptations to ensure information transfer and knowledge acquisition across disciplines and borders required reciprocity. CONCLUSIONS: Safety performance in home care service is dependent on the staff closest to the older people, who deal with safety risks and ethical dilemmas on a day-to-day basis and their access to information, competence, and resources that fit the demands. A proactive leadership characterised by mutual trust and adequate support for decision making is suggested. Managers and decision-makers across healthcare and social care need to consider how they can develop interprofessional collaborations and adaptive routines supporting safety from a broader perspective.