Stress is recognised as a major factor affecting staff working in caring roles, which includes residential care homes. This project, which as a partership between WestFocus and Kingston University, aims to identify ways to improve well-being and retention of staff in this sector.
Although organisations such as Skills for Care aim to support employers in improving standards through training, such agencies do not focus on stress impacts and management. The WestFocus university teams have wide expertise in the detection and monitoring of stress. It is in this context that the project aims to examine ways of helping care homes to provide adequate means of helping reduce stress in care staff to ensure more effective running of the homes.
The care home sector suffers from a number of staffing problems which include high staff turnover rates (50 to 75 percent per year) which leads to a lack of continuity and stability in care and miscommunication resulting in patient safety issues, worker injuries, poor morale and other quality of care issues. This has a major impact on costs in the care home sector.
Staff retention can be improved by ameliorating the working conditions for care staff. Whilst this involves improved training and remuneration it also requires attending to staff stress levels. Opportunities for stress reduction interventions are, therefore, significant and are potentially of benefit to both workers, managers and owners of care homes, and ultimately the older people in their care.
This has been confirmed in the findings of a recent focus group exercise (download PDF file) with care home workers which as part of this project sought to identify stress factors and potential solutions that could be implemented across the care home field.
