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The evolving role of health care aides in the long-term care and home and community care sectors in Canada

Overview of attention for article published in Human Resources for Health, June 2013
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About this Attention Score

  • In the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • One of the highest-scoring outputs from this source (#4 of 1,261)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (99th percentile)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (94th percentile)

Mentioned by

news
31 news outlets
blogs
3 blogs
twitter
6 X users
wikipedia
1 Wikipedia page

Citations

dimensions_citation
74 Dimensions

Readers on

mendeley
159 Mendeley
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Title
The evolving role of health care aides in the long-term care and home and community care sectors in Canada
Published in
Human Resources for Health, June 2013
DOI 10.1186/1478-4491-11-25
Pubmed ID
Authors

Whitney Berta, Audrey Laporte, Raisa Deber, Andrea Baumann, Brenda Gamble

Abstract

Health Care Aides (HCAs) provide up to 80% of the direct care to older Canadians living in long-term care facilities, or in their homes. They are an understudied workforce, and calls for health human resources strategies relating to these workers are, we feel, precipitous. First, we need a better understanding of the nature and scope of their work, and of the factors that shape it. Here, we discuss the evolving role of HCAs and the factors that impact how and where they work. The work of HCAs includes role-required behaviors, an increasing array of delegated acts, and extra-role behaviors like emotional support. Role boundaries, particularly instances where some workers over-invest in care beyond expected levels, are identified as one of the biggest concerns among employers of HCAs in the current cost-containment environment. A number of factors significantly impact what these workers do and where they work, including market-level differences, job mobility, and work structure. In Canada, entry into this 'profession' is increasingly constrained to the Home and Community Care sector, while market-level and work structure differences constrain job mobility to transitions of only the most experienced workers, to the long-term care sector. We note that this is in direct opposition to recent policy initiatives designed to encourage aging at home. Work structure influences what these workers do, and how they work; many HCAs work for three or four different agencies in order to sustain themselves and their families. Expectations with regard to HCA preparation have changed over the past decade in Canada, and training is emerging as a high priority health human resource issue. An increasing emphasis on improving quality of care and measuring performance, and on integrated team-based care delivery, has considerable implications for worker training. New models of care delivery foreshadow a need for management and leadership expertise--these workers have not historically been prepared for leadership roles. We conclude with a brief discussion of the next steps necessary to generating evidence necessary to informing a health human resource strategy relating to the provision of care to older Canadians.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 6 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 159 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Canada 3 2%
Switzerland 1 <1%
Unknown 155 97%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Master 28 18%
Student > Bachelor 25 16%
Researcher 20 13%
Student > Ph. D. Student 14 9%
Other 11 7%
Other 19 12%
Unknown 42 26%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Nursing and Health Professions 28 18%
Social Sciences 25 16%
Medicine and Dentistry 21 13%
Business, Management and Accounting 7 4%
Psychology 6 4%
Other 24 15%
Unknown 48 30%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 268. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 24 July 2020.
All research outputs
#134,281
of 25,373,627 outputs
Outputs from Human Resources for Health
#4
of 1,261 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#820
of 210,334 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Human Resources for Health
#1
of 19 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,373,627 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,261 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 13.3. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 210,334 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 19 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 94% of its contemporaries.