Healthcare Areas

In a survey conducted in 2019, the HQCA asked residents living in designated supportive living:

Do the people who work here take a personal interest in your life?

Residents could choose “Yes, always / Yes, sometimes / No, hardly ever / No, never”

To improve resident experience, many sites strive to deliver person-centred care. Part of a patient-centred approach is to consider and, wherever possible, tailor care to the resident’s unique needs and wishes.

To gather the information needed to deliver this aspect of person-centred care, staff need to build a relationship with residents. These results can help understand the quality of the relationship residents have with staff.

There are a number of factors providers and leaders can consider to better understand and improve resident experiences with staff taking a personal interest in their life. Before taking action, consider the following:

• Who might the resident be thinking about when asked about “the people who work here”?
• What expectations do residents have regarding staff taking a personal interest in their life? What might influence their perspective?
• How might staff taking a personal interest in a resident’s life impact their experiences with care?
• How are staff encouraged and supported to develop relationships with residents?
• How might the staff benefit from developing relationships with the residents?
• Which Supportive Living 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? What other collaboration might be required to make improvements in this area?
• A site may only be directly accountable for one type of staff. For example, in designated supportive living, case management and sometimes nursing care are delivered by Alberta Health Services, while other services like care aides and housekeeping are managed by a housing provider or site operator. How can providers collaborate to improve this result?

For information about the HQCA’s designated supportive living resident 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 supported living’s performance in these dimensions of quality: Acceptability and Appropriateness.

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