The influence of individual and organizational factors on person-centred dementia care

Abstract

Objectives: Although some individual and organizational contributors to person-centred care or quality of care have been studied, they have rarely been examined together. Our goal was to investigate the association of personal and organizational–environmental characteristics with self-reported person-centred behaviours in long-term residential care settings.

Method: We asked 109 long-term care staff from two Canadian long-term care homes to complete scales assessing self-reported person-centred care, organizational support for person-centred care, beliefs about personhood in dementia, and burnout. Independent variables included four employee background characteristics (age, gender, occupation, and years of education), beliefs about personhood in dementia, burnout, and three aspects of organizational support for person-centred care (the physical environment of residents, collaboration on care, and support from management). Dependent variables included five aspects of person-centred care: autonomy, personhood, knowing the person, comfort care, and support for relationships .We used multiple linear regression analysis and changes in R ² to test variable associations.

Results: Including organizational variables in regression models resulted in statistically significant (p < .05) changes in R ² for each of the five dependent variables. Including personal variables resulted in statistically significant changes in R ² for some dependent variables, but not others. In particular, including employee background characteristics resulted in a statistically significant change in R ² for comfort care, and including beliefs about personhood and burnout resulted in statistically significant changes in R ² for personhood but not for other dependent variables.

Conclusion: Organizational characteristics are associated with several aspects of person-centred dementia care. Individual characteristics, including gender, beliefs about personhood, and burnout, appear to be more important to some aspects of person-centred dementia care (e.g., respect for personhood and comfort care) than others.

Keywords:

• dementia
• nursing homes
• person-centred care
• personhood
• environment
• organization
• burnout

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. F-change.

2. Since results at the threshold of statistical significance in early studies may reach this level in later studies, we elected to interpret these results.