Improving Outcomes for Support Workers in Aged Care

The population of people requiring long-term care is growing, the workforce is ageing, and the demand, shortages and challenges are widespread and likely to increase. Support workers are central to providing care to our ageing populations. They provide the majority of direct care to residential aged care recipients and are dealing with increasingly challenging work conditions. It is therefore imperative to find effective strategies to support this key workforce group. This Mixed Research project, informed by the Medical Research Council framework for developing complex interventions, aimed to develop a peer-mentoring intervention to improve outcomes for aged care support workers in NZ. It consisted of three phases: Phase 1: To establish the conceptual and theoretical basis to define the peer-mentoring intervention protocol (Study 1A and 1B) Phase 2: To define the intervention and develop the protocol (Study 2) Phase 3: To investigate the feasibility and acceptability of the proposed intervention, and provide data required to plan a future randomised controlled (Study 3) The aim of Study 1A was to review the evidence on the effectiveness of strategies that could be incorporated into a peer-mentoring intervention improving psychosocial and turnover-related outcomes for support workers in aged care. The study found low certainty evidence for some of the previously proposed interventions. However, none of the proposed approaches stood out as particularly effective and none of them had been developed for the NZ context. Study 1B aimed to explore NZ aged care stakeholder perspectives on interventions improving outcomes for support workers. The study found there were increasing demands to support this workforce in NZ, focus on their psychosocial outcomes (job and life satisfaction, stress, and other), and use flexible approaches that can be tailored to the individual needs and preferences of support workers. However, the reported inability of the aged care organisations to invest further resources in support workers ...