Care worker interaction
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Exploring how the naturalistic skills of care-workers impact on the well-being of residents in care-homes: a micro-interactional study.
IRAS ID
275774
Contact name
R Chatwin
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Six Degrees Social Enterprise
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 6 months, 0 days
Research summary
The focus of the study
It is well established that the actions and behaviour of care-home workers has a major impact on the well-being of the people they care for. Not only do they provide practical care, but through their day-to-day presence they can also offer an underlying stability to residents. This can have many psychological and social benefits – particularly for those who may have dementia or other mental health problems.
Although care-home workers have such a far-reaching influence on the well-being of the people they look after, they are a sector of the healthcare workforce that has traditionally been under-valued and under-trained. This situation is now improving, but in contrast to virtually every other group of healthcare professionals, there has been very little research focused on understanding how they actually go about their work – how their routine one-to-one contact with residents plays out, and the effect this can have.
Our study aims to give the first detailed picture of the key ‘natural’ behaviours that care-workers use (that is, behaviour and ways of helping people that they have not necessarily been formally trained to use) that have a positive impact on the people they care for.
What we plan to do
With the full consent of staff and residents in a variety of different dementia care settings, we plan to video-record a wide range of every-day activity. We will analyse this to find particular aspects of verbal and non-verbal behaviour that appear to improve or maintain the well-being of residents.Importantly, with the help of the care staff who have been taking part in the study, we will explore how these behaviours actually ‘work’ at a very detailed level to see if they might be developed into techniques or approaches that could be taught as part of future care-worker training.
REC name
West Midlands - Coventry & Warwickshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/WM/0262
Date of REC Opinion
1 Dec 2020
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion