Involving Family Members as Care Partners for Residents of Long- Term Care Homes
Many residents of long-term care (LTC) homes (nursing homes) are socially isolated or lonely.
They became more socially isolated and lonely when the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in policies that prevented visitors from entering into these homes.
The Designated Care Partner (DCPs) program was introduced in some Ontario LTC homes to allow designated family members to safely enter the homes and provide support for residents.
Our research team worked with three LTC homes to develop and implement this program. The work involved an ongoing process of planning and taking steps to implement the program, gathering data about how people were experiencing the implementation, and then using this data to improve the implementation process.
Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.
To understand the effects of the DCP program, and what helped or didn’t help its implementation, we conducted 65 interviews with LTC staff and DCPs.
We found that the presence of family members had a positive impact on the mental and physical health of residents.
Screening and training the DCPs was important but could have been improved. The emotional and social support provided by DCPs was very important. DCPs could play a helpful role in meetings to plan the care of their family members.
If possible there should be more than two DCPs for each resident. In the later stages of the pandemic some DCPs did not always follow infection protocols correctly. Some families did not participate in the DCP program.
Challenges included inadequate funding and staff shortages. Sometimes the communication and relationships between staff and family members were difficult and resulted in misunderstandings, particularly when there were language barriers.
Our project showed a need for additional resources in LTC, and for more efforts to improve partnerships between staff and family caregivers.
Read the paper — Implementing and improving designated care partner programs in three Ontario long-term care homes by James Conklin, Maryam Mohammadi Dehcheshmeh, Douglas Archibald, Jacobi Elliott, Amy Hsu, Anita Kothari, Paul Stolee, and Heidi Sveistrup.
