Quality of Care and Job Satisfaction in the European Home Care Setting: Research Protocol.

Liza Van Eenoo,Anja Declercq,Hein Van Hout,Henriëtte Van Der Roest

doi:10.5334/ijic.2519

Abstract

Introduction:Since the European population is ageing, a growing number of elderly will need home care. Consequently, high quality home care for the elderly remains an important challenge. Job satisfaction among care professionals is regarded as an important aspect of the quality of home care.Aim:This paper describes a research protocol to identify elements that have an impact on job satisfaction among care professionals and on quality of care for older people in the home care setting of six European countries.Methods:Data on elements at the macro-level (policy), meso-level (care organisations) and micro-level (clients) are of importance in determining job satisfaction and quality of care. Macro-level indicators will be identified in a previously published literature review. At meso- and micro-level, data will be collected by means of two questionnaires utilsed with both care organisations and care professionals, and by means of interRAI Home Care assessments of clients. The client assessments will be used to calculate quality of care indicators. Subsequently, data will be analysed by means of linear and stepwise multiple regression analyses, correlations and multilevel techniques.Conclusions and Discussion:These results can guide health care policy makers in their decision making process in order to increase the quality of home care in their organisation, in their country or in Europe.

Highlights

Since the European population is ageing, a growing number of elderly will need home care
To measure quality of care, we hypothesise that we need information on macro, meso and micro level
We hypothesise that the job satisfaction among care professionals must be sufficiently high in order to provide good quality of care

Summary

Introduction

Since the European population is ageing, a growing number of elderly will need home care. Methods: Data on elements at the macro-level (policy), meso-level (care organisations) and micro-level (clients) are of importance in determining job satisfaction and quality of care. The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) concluded in 2004 that approximately 20% of the European population aged 65 years and older were physical dependent, which was defined as ‘cannot perform activities of daily living due to physical limitation’ [3]. Of those dependent older persons, 42% received formal care. Two out of three of the formal care users (67%) received formal care at home, with a variation between 44% in Belgium and 83% in Italy [3]

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