Staff personhood in dementia care settings: "Do they care about me?"

Abstract

This article aims to examine RCAs' own experiences of personhood in dementia care settings. Conceptually, person-centred care entails fostering the personhood of residents and the residential care aides (RCAs) who provide much of their hands-on care. To date, however, staff personhood has been overlooked in the empirical literature. The study was part of a larger focused ethnographic project exploring how the organisational care environment impedes or facilitates the provision of quality dementia care. Semi-structured interviews with 23 RCAs and more than 230hours of participant observation were conducted in two nursing homes with specialised dementia units in British Columbia, Canada. Two overarching themes, "personhood undermined-management-staff relations" and "personhood undermined-workplace policies and practices" emerged, illustrating how, despite exposure to features believed beneficial to their working environment (e.g., favourable staffing ratios, relatively good remuneration), RCAs encountered repeated affronts to their personhood. The first theme encompasses the importance of being known (i.e., as persons and of their job demands) and valued (i.e., appreciated for their work in non-monetary terms). The second highlights the salience of work-life balance, full-staffing coverage and supportive human resource practices. RCAs' experiences reveal how the ongoing search for cost-efficiencies, cost-containment and cost-accountability overshadows their individuality, indicating a key disconnect between conceptual ideals and workplace realities. Organisations are encouraged to consider creating person-centred management and workplace practices that provide tangible evidence that RCAs, and their work, matter.