Healthcare Areas

In a survey conducted from May to October 2017, the HQCA asked family members of residents living in long term care:

In the last six months, did you help with the care of your family member when you visited because nurses or aides either didn’t help or made him or her wait too long?

Family members could choose “Yes / No”

Aspects of staffing and relationships with staff, including responsiveness, have a strong influence on the overall experience rating of care from the family member’s perspective.

There are a number of factors providers and leaders can consider to better understand and improve family members’ experience with staff responsiveness. Before taking action, consider the following:

• This question asks purposefully if the family member chose to help with care because staff were either unavailable or unable to respond to their loved one’s needs. What are family member expectations for staff responsiveness? When those expectations are not being met, what types of tasks are family members are helping with? Which tasks do family members do most often? Could that put the resident at risk?
• Many sites value the involvement of family members with the care of their loved one in certain situations. When do staff and leadership feel family member involvement is important? Does this align with the family member’s perspective?
• What are some of the common needs or activities where family involvement is actually required? How are those requirements communicated to and planned in collaboration with family members?
• How could differences between family member and staff expectations be resolved? How is the resident perspective considered?
• Which Long Term Care Accommodation Standard(s) does this question help inform, if any?
• Which Continuing Care Health Service Standard(s) does this question help inform, if any?
• Who should be involved in discussions to improve these results? How could residents and/or family members be engaged to develop solutions (e.g., engage the resident and family council)? What other collaboration might be required to make improvements in this area?

For information about the HQCA’s long term care family experience survey, please visit the HQCA website.

The Health Quality Council of Alberta uses the Alberta Quality Matrix for Health as a way of organizing information and thinking around the complexity of the healthcare system. This measure can be used as input to assess long term care’s performance in these dimensions of quality: Acceptability, Accessibility, Appropriateness, and Safety.

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