Lifetime and workplace traumatic events among care aides who work in long-term care homes: Influences on job burnout, mental health, and intention to leave

Long-term care (LTC) homes, which provide care services for our older populations, have long faced significant challenges related to workforce shortages and staff well-being. These issues have worsened due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, up to 20% of care aides, the backbone of direct care staff, report wanting to leave their positions due to job burnout. This could lead to severe problems in the quality of care provided to older residents. Care aides face various stressors in their workplace, from everyday minor challenges to potentially traumatic events that can have lasting negative impacts on their health and job satisfaction. However, we lack sufficient research to fully understand how these stressful events affect care aides and their well-being. We also lack information on how past traumatic experiences throughout their lives might worsen these problems. New national standards for LTC emphasize the need for trauma-informed care and the creation of supportive work environments for staff. This project aims to address these challenges and provide insights to help develop better support strategies for care aides. Our research goals are to identify traumatic events care aides have experienced in their lives and at work and explore how these experiences affect their mental health, burnout, and intentions to leave their job. We will then determine personal and work-related factors that protect against these negative impacts. These findings will help us pinpoint where and how we can intervene to solve these problems. We will survey over 2,000 care aides in Alberta's LTC homes to gather information on their experiences of stressful and traumatic events, work environments, and health. Through comprehensive analysis, the survey data will help us achieve our research goals. The research findings will help develop recommendations for trauma-informed care practices, and eventually help improve care aides' well-being, leading to better care for residents in LTC homes.