Ethics Environment in Long-Term Care

Abstract

This study assesses three hypotheses regarding a long-term care facility’s ethics environment and the relationships between ethics environment, employees’ work features, and residents’ outcomes. Validated questionnaires measure ethics environment, work satisfaction, managing disagreement, goal attainment, care and work opinion including retention, and mental health status among full-time employees ( N = 110; 53%) and residents ( N = 139; 57%) who volunteered for this cross-sectional cohort analysis. Ethics environment is rated above average (> 3.0, 1-5 scale) by employees and residents, with statistically significant ( p = .001) Spearman correlations between ethics environment and employees’ attainment of goals, opinion of care, and work satisfaction; between residents’ ethics environment and care opinion and mental status (MCS, SF-36). Among others, ethics environment is revealed as a robust correlate to two critical factors for quality care: employees’ care opinion including retention and residents’ mental health. It is possible to develop and sustain ethics environments, thus these findings are applicable to clinical practice.