Abstract
BackgroundThe aim of this review is to describe the challenges and barriers to conducting research in long-term care facilities.MethodsA literature search was conducted in Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane Central, PsycINFO and CINAHL. Keywords used included “long term care”, “nursing home”, “research”, “trial”, “challenge” and “barrier”, etc. Resulting references were screened in order to identify relevant studies that reported on challenges derived from first-hand experience of empirical research studies. Challenges were summarized and synthesized.ResultsOf 1723 references, 39 articles were selected for inclusion. To facilitate understanding we proposed a classification framework of 8 main themes to categorize the research challenges presented in the 39 studies, relating to the characteristics of facility/owner/administrator, resident, staff caregiver, family caregiver, investigator, ethical or legal concerns, methodology, and budgetary considerations.ConclusionsConducting research in long-term care facilities is full of challenges which can be categorized into 8 main themes. Investigators should be aware of all these challenges and specifically address them when planning their studies. Stakeholders should be involved from an early stage and flexibility should be built into both the methodology and research budget.
Highlights
The aim of this review is to describe the challenges and barriers to conducting research in long-term care facilities
Of the 39 papers included in this review, 20 were based on studies conducted in the United States [24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43], 15 were based on those from the United Kingdom [44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58], and 1 study from each of Australia [59], New Zealand [60], France [61] and Norway [62]
With the help of a thematic synthesis approach we created a framework of 8 main themes to categorize the challenges reported in the 39 studies: facility/owner/administrator factors, resident factors, staff caregiver factors, family caregiver factors, investigator factors, ethical/legal factors, methodological factors and budgetary factors (Table 1)
Summary
The aim of this review is to describe the challenges and barriers to conducting research in long-term care facilities. In the USA as of 2010, 1.2 million people or 3.1% of those aged 65 and over lived in a skilled-nursing facility, while in Canada as of 2011, 4.5% of those in the same demographic, yielding a total of 224,000 people lived in a ‘nursing home’ or ‘LTC hospital’ Some of these focused on older adults as research subjects, but were not necessarily in LTC settings.
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