Policy obstacles and opportunities in providing community-building resources and supports for the long-term care workforce

During the COVID-19 pandemic, long-term care (LTC) residents were especially vulnerable to infection and death, and the stress on LTC employees has been huge. A type of stress they experienced is moral distress. This is the pain or anguish of knowing but being unable to do what is needed because of circumstances outside their control. For LTC employees, moral distress happened when they had to force confused residents into their rooms, or were unable to attend to residents calling out for help. Moral distress among employees is important to recognize because, compared to health issues such as burnout which focuses the problem on the individual, moral distress focuses on problems with the contexts and processes in which individuals do their jobs. We need to fix problems with contexts and processes, but in the meantime, we need transformational policies that can increase resources and supports to help LTC employees manage or avoid the distress. We did foundational research to listen to LTC employees about their moral distress experiences and what can help mitigate their distress. We learned that employee moral distress is substantial but can be reduced by having more and better ways to connect and collaborate with their co-workers and managers. Our purpose in this project is to create policy recommendations for increasing LTC employee resources and supports for connecting and collaborating with co-workers and managers. To create these recommendations, we will study provincial LTC policy as well as the policies of a variety of LTC homes. We will obtain input from our stakeholders about how to use our findings to create policy recommendations and we will share our recommendations with policymakers. In the long term, we expect our recommendations can lead to policy that helps LTC employees stay in their jobs and provide good care.