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Partnership working in care homes for older people does happen, but the nature of this approach to improving the care provided in care homes has not been well articulated. Drawing on the experiences of participants (researchers, relatives and care home managers) from three projects the benefits and challenges of partnership working in this care setting are discussed. The benefits of working in partnership extended beyond the specific remit for each project, through the development of closer relationships between people in the care home. The challenges of partnership working derived largely from the process of learning to work together and the practicalities of finding time to invest in projects beyond the normal care demands. Requirements for successful partnership working were identified and included a need for time, a core group of committed participants and preliminary groundwork.

This chapter explores variation in direct care workers’ health risks within institutional and home-based settings, according to the demographic composition of workers and the gendered, raced, and citizenship-based expressions of their work roles.

This quantitative intersectional study draws on two nationwide datasets from the US National Center for Long-term Care Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Nursing Assistant Study (NNAS), and National Home Health Aide Survey (NHHAS).

Workplace context was the strongest predictor of workers’ health risks and working conditions. Physical injuries affected more than half of facility-based workers annually compared to less than 10% of home-based workers. Facility-based workers are more likely to report insufficient time for tasks, lower job satisfaction, and less respect and appreciation from patients. Home-based workers may be more likely to experience emotional distress, be offered fewer benefits, but experience fewer injuries, due to the better relative health of their patients and having more time for client care. Women reported more injuries and more time pressure than men across racial and citizenship groups within the same work setting.

There are limitations to the NHHAS and NNAS public-release data file data. We are unable to fully capture citizenship, some racial/ethnic categories, workers over age 65, supervisory workers, facilities with fewer than three residents, and facilities not certified with Medicare or Medicaid. The exclusion of these questions, workers, and contexts is a weakness of the present study.

Analyses draw on data from the first nationally representative sample surveys of home health aides and nursing assistants in the United States. Direct care workers are an important population to capture through intersectional research since care work is done predominantly by multiracial women and immigrants. This research also underscores the importance of workplace contexts in shaping the labor performed and the workers’ experiences.

The aim of this chapter was to analyze of the most hazardous aspects of home care work in Italy.

The chapter is based on a multi-method analysis conducted in Italy, including a survey on a sample of 867 home care assistants, and four focus groups organized with home care assistants.

The data collected show that: (1) there is a strong correlation between the physical and emotional complexity of the work and the workers’ malaise; (2) the live-in formula is not clearly linked with high levels of psychophysical malaise, while isolation is associated much more strongly with a high index of malaise; and (3) violence in the workplace is clearly one of the main risks to which home care assistants are exposed.

The findings may suffer from limitations due to the type of data collected. First, it was a convenience survey, so the results are not generalizable and they may be negatively influenced by bias relating to sample self-selection. Second, the empirical research was not designed to investigate occupational health alone, so accurate information on symptoms, causes of ill-health, experiences of violence, and the meaning of respondents’ malaise and of the episodes of violence were not available. Third, with the help of an epidemiologist, we could have included some diagnostic tests to better ascertain the workers’ state of health.

The chapter offers an original contribution to sociological research on the occupational health hazards from a gender-specific perspective. First, it investigates workers’ health risks in an understudied and highly feminized and racialized occupational sector. It also analyzes the implications of both the emotional and the body work on the workers’ health. It deals with the correlation between cohabitation and health problems. Finally, it looks into the impact of workplace violence on workers’ health, which is a strongly gendered issue, and rooted in social processes that stigmatize and racialize migrant women employed as home care assistants.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how surveillance facilitates new power relationships.

This longitudinal qualitative study is predicated on observations of the home care workers interacting with their managers and clients. The emerging picture was complemented with interviews of the participants. The home care workers were chosen as being crucial in the construction of new everyday relationships, and their interpretations were given most value in presenting how surveillance and monitoring relationships are constructed as embedded mundane practices and as emerging from practical needs.

The paper discusses an implementation and use case of surveillance capable technology in a social home care setting. The findings suggest discrepancy of how surveillance is being interpreted by different participants depending on their positioning in the context of use.

The study presents a case study where surveillance issues emerge not only at the workplace but also in the domestic sphere. The paper explores the workers' role in defining surveillance at the workplace, and questions the limits of legitimate surveillance in the social care context concerning vulnerable citizens as clients.

The purpose of this study is to explore home care nurses' experience of learning in a multicultural environment.

The study was based on qualitative research design. Data were collected through repeated interviews with registered home care nurses working in a multicultural area. The data were analyzed through a qualitative content analysis with a direct approach.

Six categories describing nurses' experiences of learning were developed in order to define which components were determinative in facilitating or constraining home care in a multicultural environment. The findings show that home care demands high individual nursing skills and also offers many opportunities for further learning. The most important sources of learning were the challenges presented in the daily experience of encountering diversity of patients and families, by informal social interactions and exchange of knowledge with colleagues.

The strength of this study is that data are collected by two different methods with time for reflection in between. Limitations are that only female nurses participate in the study and from one team of nurses.

The findings can be used by nurses to create an awareness of the opportunities that exist in everyday work. For managers, this study highlights learning and constraints that exist on the organisation level.

This article adds to existing research by describing the learning environment for home care nurses in relation to the theoretical framework that examines the factors which either facilitate or constrain learning at work.

High turnover of staff in the long-term dementia care sector contributes to poor quality care and lack of continuity of care in the UK and many other countries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the research evidence on what care assistants report they enjoy when working in front-line dementia care jobs in long-term care facilities.

An integrative analysis was used to study research findings focusing on the front-line workforce in care homes. The literature review sought to capture key findings, including overviews of research, from studies from 1990 to mid-2014 that have considered the positive experiences of front-line care home staff working with people with dementia.

There is a great deal of research investigating care home staff's job satisfaction. Much of this highlights the importance of personal, social and managerial relationships. Common themes continue to be reported. There is potential for work on improving care assistant experiences in care homes but also a need to address long-standing inequities affecting the care home sector.

Some studies are not precise about which staff groups they are investigating in studies about care homes and many concentrate on the problems staff report. Measures of job satisfaction vary. When exploring dementia-related care not all studies are clear if care home residents have dementia or not.

Many studies have investigated the views of care assistants working with people with dementia in care homes that address happiness in their work, often reported as job or work satisfaction, and these should be consulted when developing dementia services or managing care homes. As with other parts of the social care workforce, employers and managers need to be aware of effective and acceptable workforce reforms and ways to reduce turnover.

This review suggests the value of investigating positive aspects of care work with people with dementia living in care homes. Greater attention could be paid to job satisfaction in social care more widely.

Precarious work, characterized by low wages, unpredictable schedules and hours, physical hazards, and stressful psychosocial conditions, is a significant problem in the twenty-first century US economy. It most harshly affects women, racial/ethnic minorities, and immigrants. Caring labor jobs often involve precarious work and home health aide jobs are among the most precarious of these. With an ageing population creating high demand and a decline in the number of available workers, a societal crisis looms. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a business form that could positively impact the home care work environment.

This paper reviews previous research to call for closer examination of worker cooperatives as a means to reduce precarious work among home health care workers.

Worker cooperatives provide opportunities for economic empowerment for impoverished and marginalized workers. Cooperative Home Care Associates, a worker cooperative in the home care industry, reports better outcomes to workers than similar conventionally governed businesses.

This paper reviews results of a study comparing three organizational forms in the home health industry. Although there are relatively few worker cooperatives in the USA, future research should investigate this structure both where there is a low-wage labor force, and in general.

Better outcomes for employees in the worker cooperative suggest that this is a viable business form for workers in precarious work environments.

The paper highlights the features of an organizational form that could help alleviate social ills caused by precarious work.

This paper considers the structure and function of a business form little studied in the management discipline. Based on their unique features and possibilities, worker cooperatives should be of interest to equality, diversity, and inclusion scholars; and to strategy, organizational behavior, and entrepreneurship scholars.

The purpose of this paper is to present findings from face-to-face interviews with three former care staff who were proven to have abused some of the older people living in the care and nursing homes in which they had once worked. The research sought to explore the intra-personal dynamics, personal characteristics and work experiences that led these staff to perpetrate abuse.

Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with three former care and nursing home staff who had committed abusive acts and the data secured subjected to thematic narrative analysis.

None of the three people interviewed had intended to become care staff and reported that the interview and induction processes they experienced did little to establish their suitability for the work they would be undertaking or to prepare them for its demands. Participants expressed their generally negative perceptions of older people, particularly those living with dementia, and told of how they also felt that they were under pressure to conform with the often abusive care home regimes that they had entered. They also recounted some specific abusive practices developed to allow them to manage the constant tension between the time available to complete all of the tasks required when “caring” for older people, and revealed their perceptions of external scrutiny of care home conduct and the behaviours developed to deflect the effectiveness of this oversight. Two interview participants also revealed their unfavourable attitudes to some of the people they were employed to care for that were based upon perceptions of ethnic differences, and of how this had contributed to the abuse they perpetrated.

Though the research draws upon the experiences of only three former care staff, the data reveal some of the intra-personal dimensions of individual staff who have engaged in abusive acts, and illuminates how the care home environment with which they interact can engender conditions under which abuse is more likely to occur.

Unusually, the paper explores the characteristics, perceptions and experiences of care staff who have actually committed abusive acts against those entrusted to their care.

This study aims to analyze the well-being experience of home care workers regardless of the service management model. It also aims to analyze their emotional experiences of their activity and working conditions.

This study, using a mixed qualitative and quantitative analysis, allows a combined analysis for a better understanding of the well-being experience of home care workers.

Home care workers experience intrinsic job satisfaction and demonstrate this with positive emotions regardless of their work situation.

Caring for the carer should be a business value. Measures oriented toward workers’ comfort generate greater happiness and commitment, which is automatically transferred to the quality of the care provided and reduces the psychosocial risks of their professional activity.

Visualizing the social reality of an essential profession through research generates verifiable evidence that will help to improve the working conditions of home care workers in Spain.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this pioneering study in Spain introduces a greater understanding of how home care workers in Spain experience their work reality.

Migrant home care workers constitute a vulnerable group in society, which is often exposed to work-related abuse. The purpose of this paper is to explore which characteristics are linked with their abuse.

Overall, 187 Filipino home care workers who work in Israel were recruited via snowball sampling and filled an anonymous questionnaire regarding work-related abuse incidents and working conditions.

More than half of the participants reported exposure to abuse (e.g. sexual, physical, or emotional) or exploitation (e.g. asking to do more than job requirements). Particularly vulnerable were migrant workers during their first year in the host country and those who were taking care of an older adult with cognitive impairment. Interestingly, men who served as care workers were more susceptible to abuse than women.

The findings point to specific characteristics which make home care workers more susceptible to abuse illustrate the need for a closer supervision on the working conditions of home care workers, especially during the initial period of their work. Training migrant home care workers in the area of dementia care is also important.