Yin Siu Low, Prof Sunil Bhar, and Dr Won Sun Chen
Department of Psychological Sciences, School of Health Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
The number of people aged 65 or above living in Australia has increased from 4.6% in 1922 to 16.2% in 2021. [1] Compared to younger working aged adults, older adults have greater health related comorbidities, frailty and increased levels of cognitive impairment. [2, 3] Older adults are at increased risk of living in residential aged care facilities when their needs cannot be easily supported in the community. By 2050, 3.5 million older Australians will require residential aged care services and almost one million aged care workers will be required to support these services. [4] We are therefore very reliant on such workers to support the increased numbers of older adults who will require residential aged care.
Residential aged care staff, however, are at risk themselves of increased stress. They have heavy workloads, insufficient resources, are at risk of violence from residents and encounter conflicts with residents’ families [5, 6], all of which may lead to such workers experiencing occupational burnout.
Researchers at Swinburne University are developing programs to prevent residential care staff burnout. They recently surveyed 133 staff around Australia to identify contributors to burnout amongst residential staff and found that lack of support, self-confidence and coping skills were associated with burnout. [7] These associations were significant even when controlling for demographics, work patterns and organisational climate. More specifically, higher levels of social support predicted lower emotional exhaustion and lower depersonalisation levels. Further, higher levels of confidence predicted lower emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, as well as higher personal accomplishment levels. Finally, higher levels of adaptive coping predicted lower emotional exhaustion levels.
This study suggests burnout prevention strategies are needed to assist residential aged care staff to gain support from supervisors and colleagues, to develop staff adaptive coping skills and to enhance staff confidence. You can read more about the work by Swinburne University researchers at: https://bmcnurs.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12912-022-00901-6.
*The views and opinions expressed in Knowledge Blogs are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of ARIIA, Flinders University and/or the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care.