Healthcare Areas

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

Can you depend on the employees?

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

When staff support is dependable, it can mean the support is reliable and consistent. Aspects of resident experience related to staffing and relationships with staff, like this one related to dependability, have a strong influence on the overall experience of care from the resident’s perspective.

There are a number of factors providers and leaders can consider to better understand and improve resident experiences with depending on the staff. Some questions they could ask before taking action include:

• What does dependability mean to residents? What do residents depend on staff for?
• How important is consistency of staff to the residents?
• How is dependency on staff balanced with encouraging resident independence?
• What are the resident’s expectations for the level of support required for these needs or activities? How might this differ from the staff member’s expectations?
• How are staff encouraged and supported to develop relationships with residents, so they can develop a common understanding about the type and level of support that is needed and can be provided?
• Who should be involved in discussions to improve these results? How could residents and/or loved ones be engaged to develop solutions? What other collaboration might be required to make improvements in this area?

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, Accessibility, Appropriateness, Effectiveness, and Safety.

LEARN MORE