Nursing Home Staff Perspectives of the Benefits and Challenges of Providing Dementia Care.

OBJECTIVES

To capture nursing home staff perspectives on the benefits and challenges related to caring for residents living with Alzheimer disease and other related dementias. These perspectives will inform the initial development of strategies to help with staff retention.

DESIGN

A secondary qualitative analysis of semistructured interviews conducted with nursing home staff, which was embedded within a pragmatic clinical trial.

SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS

Purposive sampling was used to capture perspectives of staff spanning across job roles from 23 nursing homes.

METHODS

During the parent study primary analysis, staff experiences providing dementia care were consistently described. In response, this study completed a secondary analysis of study data using thematic analysis to identify benefits and challenges of caring for this population.

RESULTS

Analysis of nursing home staff (n = 327) interviews captured benefits and challenges of caring for residents living with dementia. Three themes reflected staff perspectives of the benefits, including valuing interpersonal relationship with residents (eg, learning about residents' likes, dislikes, and history), providing care fosters a sense of purpose, and the variability of the job from day to day (eg, getting to use different strategies to interact with residents). Two themes portrayed the challenges staff articulated, including feeling discouraged because of ineffective care strategies (eg, not being able to manage residents' behaviors) and the toll that caring for this resident population takes on staff mental health (eg, death of residents).

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

Nursing home staff report benefits and challenges to providing care to people with dementia. To assist with staff retention and lower staff turnover, nursing home administrators need to take into consideration how to help their staff manage the challenges and facilitate the benefits through the implementation of organizational strategies.