Elderly care in time
In elderly care, especially home care, the forms of employment have changed radically in recent years. The uncertainty about when, where, and how the staff should work has increased through systems such as “informal” short-term substitutes, and split schedules with minute planning of working time in the mobile phone. In the project “The organized uncertainty in elderly care. About quality, conditions for resistance and staff’s willingness to stay”, researchers from Karlstad University and Linnaeus University investigate what significance the organized uncertainty has for quality in work, work environment, and staff’s inclination to stay in the profession.
The development of elderly care towards changed forms of employment has created particularly uncertain working conditions for nursing assistants and nurses. They are perceived as uncertain conditions and also affect how one can plan one’s leisure time. As in several other labor market sectors, the development is towards increased insecurity and individualization. At the same time, Sweden faces a major challenge with a sharply increased demand for trained labor in elderly care. The project highlights the development of the uncertainty that characterizes elderly care work and what consequences this has for the employees and for the quality of the efforts.
Central to the project is that organized uncertainty is assumed to have different meanings for different categories of employees based on age, gender, and ethnicity.
The study aims to investigate how elderly care work is affected by long-term organized uncertainty regarding employment conditions. There are mainly four questions that are in focus:
- What significance does organized uncertainty have for how care work is performed and how does it affect the quality of the efforts?
- What does organized uncertainty mean for staff’s willingness to stay in the profession?
- What does organized uncertainty mean for the experience of work for different categories of staff within elderly care in terms of age, gender and ethnicity?
- What individual and collective resistance strategies do staff use to cope with organized uncertainty?
Two municipalities, one in a larger city and one in rural areas, participate in the study. Through interviews with managers, review of contracts, schedules, and policy documents as well as not least individual interviews with nurses and nursing assistants, focus groups, and job shadowing in everyday life, the researchers will find out how the uncertain employment conditions affect the business in one of Sweden’s largest sectors.
The project runs during 2023 - 2025 and has been awarded SEK 5 million by Forte - The Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare. The research is carried out in cooperation between Karlstad University and Linnaeus University.