Project 6
Home care in Canada: Working at the nexus of public and private sphere
Project Goals - What are we doing?
This study examines the role of home support and community health workers employed through Home Care agencies in the continuum of care to community-dwelling elderly persons receiving post-acute or chronic care. Our research has three areas of focus: home support workers, elderly clients and family members.
Research Outcomes - What will be achieved?
This study focuses on three intersecting sets of issues: the mechanisms by which home support workers negotiate the private sphere of client's homes and families versus the public world of health services; the issues facing home support workers in relation to perceptions of professional and non-professional roles and relationships with employers and co-workers, as well as elderly clients and their unpaid caregivers; the balance of the emotional versus contractual nature of the 'care' relationship with elderly clients; prevalence of the use of unpaid time to meet client needs.
Background - Why is this research important?
Home Care - the delivery of health and social services to individuals living in the community - is the fastest growing sector within health services delivery in Canada. Care costs have doubled over the past decade, growing 19.9 percent between 1975 and 1992, compared with the 10.8 percent growth in overall health care spending. Health human resource projections suggest that Canada will need to double the number of home care workers (currently estimated at approximately 32,000) in order to meet demands by the end of the decade.
Project Team
Principal Investigator:
Anne Martin-Matthews, PhD
Professor
Department of Social Work and Family Studies,UBC
Scientific Director of CIHR Institute of Aging
Centre for Hip Health
Co-Investigators:
aging, health behaviour, social gerontology, widowhood, family studies, gender caregiving, home care social support, rural aging
Contact information:
School of Social Work & Family Studies,UBC
2080 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
amm@interchange.ubc.ca
Funding Support:
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)