Leadership for quality in long-term care.

Leadership in long-term care is a burgeoning field of research, particularly that which is focused on enabling point of care staff to provide high-quality and responsive healthcare. In this article, we focus on the relatively important role that leadership plays in enabling the conditions for high-quality long-term care. Our methodological approach involved a rapid in-depth ethnography undertaken by an interdisciplinary team across eight public and non-profit long-term care homes in Canada, where we conducted over 1,000 hours of observations and 275 formal and informal interviews with managers, staff, residents, family members and volunteers. Guiding our analysis post hoc is the LEADS in a Caring Environment framework. We mapped key promising leadership practices identified by our analysis and discuss how these can inform the development of leadership standards across staff and management in long-term care.

Counter-narratives of active aging: Disability, trauma, and joy in the age-friendly city.

Dominant narratives about late life promote active aging, while anti-aging ones mobilize tropes of decline and irrelevance. In contrast, counter-narratives raise questions that spark new conversations about the promising practices that could foster more age-friendly cities. In this article, we describe our feminist and ethnographic approach to interviews and digital storytelling that aim to amplify the voices of marginalized older adults living with disability, violence, and colonialism, and share findings from this endeavor. We discuss the interviews with, and stories shared, by two disabled older adults - an Indigenous woman and a white paraplegic man - and the aging futures their counter-stories suggest. These stories reveal these participants' ongoing struggles to create meaning in their lives, and how their relationships to the physical, cultural, and social environment of the city, including its supports and services, can both support and hinder this becoming.

Gender Regimes in Ontario Nursing Homes: Organization, Daily Work, and Bodies.

Today more men work in the long-term care sector, but men are still in the minority. Little is known about men's experiences in care work, and the dilemmas and opportunities they face because of their gender. This article focuses on men care workers' integration into the organization and flow of nursing home work as perceived by these workers and staff members. Using a rapid ethnography method in two Ontario nursing homes, we found work organization affected interpretations of gender and race, and that workers' scope for discretion affected the integration and acceptance of men as care workers. In a nursing home with a rigid work organization and little worker discretion, women workers perceived men workers as a problem, whereas at a nursing home with a more flexible work organization that stressed relational care, both women and men workers perceived men workers as a resource in the organization.

"Careworkers don't have a voice:" epistemological violence in residential care for older people.

Drawing on feminist epistemologies, this paper attends to the way the reductionist assumptions have shaped the organization of nursing home carework in manners that are insufficient to the needs of relational care. This paper is informed by a study involving nine focus groups and a survey of Canadian residential care workers (141 RNs, 139 LPNs and 415 frontline careworkers). Four major themes were identified. Reductionist assumptions contributed to routinized, task-based approaches to care, resulting in what careworkers termed "assembly line care." Insufficient time and emphasis on the relational dimensions of care made it difficult to "treat residents as human beings." Accountability, enacted as counting and documenting, led to an "avalanche of paperwork" that took time away from care. Finally, hierarchies of knowledge contributed to systemic exclusions and the perception that "careworkers' don't have a voice." Careworkers reported distress as a result of the tensions between the organization of work and the needs of relational care. We theorize these findings as examples of "epistemological violence," a concept coined by Vandana Shiva (1988) to name the harm that results from the hegemony of reductionist assumptions. While not acting alone, we argue that reductionism has played an important role in shaping the context of care both at a policy and organizational level, and it continues to shape the solutions to problems in nursing home care in ways that pose challenges for careworkers. We conclude by suggesting that improving the quality of both work and care will require respecting the specificities of care and its unique epistemological and ontological nature.