Work with the Elderly - Essay Example

?Choosing the right personal to work with the elderly and handicap in Assisted Living Facilities Research Proposal 0 Introduction The responsibility of taking care of the elderly and handicap is no mean job. To do this effectively, on requires certain level of learned knowledge, and skill (Boston, et al., 1996).). Quite apart from the academic requirements, it is important that whoever assumes the place of taking care of such elderly people and the handicap have very high levels of commitment and dedication to go about such a responsibility. The need of all these requirements comes from the fact that taking care of the elderly and handicap is quite challenging and difficult. It is for this reason that the processes that go into the selection of people to take up the task of taking care of the elderly and handicap in our various care homes and institutions need to be done with a very high level of precision, effectiveness and mastery. The process must never be done with the aim of just filling up vacancies. If this happens, square pegs shall be used to fill round holes and this will cause a lot of inconvenience. Research has shown that the effect of wrong placement into vacancies for personal to work with the elderly and handicap results in a lot of repelling effect and creates a viscous cycle. For instance the personal become prone to high levels of employee turnover because they find themselves unfitting to the task. The elderly and handicap also become affected in the sense that they become deprived from the basic care and support that they need and this may affect their health and longevity. Administrators and managers of various home cares also suffer the consequences of employee turnover. 1.1 Problem Statement There is the specific need for the selection of personal to the position of elderly and handicap care givers to be well scrutinized, structured and monitored. The problem at hand therefore has to do with effective recruitment and selection for care givers to take up the social responsibility of taking care of the elderly and handicap. In the opinion of the researcher, a well managed recruitment and selection exercise for personal as care givers would need to improved health and general longevity for the elderly and handicap in society and make such people more useful to society. It is for this need that the present problem is very important to be studied. 1.2 Rationale for the Research The present study will seek to eliminate all forms of incompetence and ineptitude in the social work department, especially those that has to do with the care of the elderly and handicap. The rationale that was used to determine the importance of this study was inspired by recent reports on the impact that knowledge, skills and experience has on care giving for the elderly and handicap. In recent times, reports have been made of how the need to create employment has resulted in the recruitment of graduates into care homes when those graduates actually studied nothing about that field in school (Altman, 2001).). These researches have also outlined the dying consequences of such acts. It is with the need to eliminate all these inadequacies that the researcher finds the current research very useful and important to undertake. By every indication, such as research would not just benefit the inmates of care homes who will be assured of the best of care from competent professionals but the society in general shall benefit because these elderly and handicap shall become very useful integrated members of society. 1.3 Statement of the Research Objectives There is a general aim of improving recruitment and selection of personal to work with the elderly and handicap. To achieve this general aim however, it is important that certain specific objectives be set. The achievement of these specific objectives would constitute the eventual achievement of the research aim. The objectives are: 1. To identify specific inappropriate practices that go on as far as the recruitment and selection of personal into care homes are concerned. 2. To design a recruitment and selection code that can be used to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in the recruitment of and placement of personal in care homes. 3. To identify specific needs and challenges of the elderly and handicap that are needed to be addressed by professional care givers. 4. To assess the benefits of placing on the best and most deserving professionals in care homes to take care of the elderly and handicap. 1.4 Hypothesis H1: If the right professionals are recruited to work with the elderly and handicap; then the general health and longevity of the elderly and handicap will be made better. H2: If the wrong people are recruited to work with the elderly and handicap; then the general health and longevity of the elderly and handicap will be deteriorated. Subsequent to these hypothesis, it is academically proven that the elderly and handicap both have peculiar psychosocial needs that has to be addressed by competent professionals by the use of professional techniques that cannot be executed by unknowledgeable people in that area of study. This means that the kind of people who are made to address the care needs of the elderly and handicap go a long way to determine how transformational the social and psychological betterment of the elderly and handicap would be. 1.5 Definition of Terms Elderly: These are people who have reached their retirement age and so indisposed that they need the care of other people to go about their daily activities such as eating, washing, cleaning and so on. Handicap: These are people with physical bodily defects and disability. These include people who have loss their limbs, the hearing impaired and the visually impaired. Recruitment: The act of sampling people to apply for vacancies and eventually choosing the best of applicants to take up the positions. Care givers: These are personal who offer assistance to needy people and work with the elderly and handicap. Longevity: The total number of years that a person would spend before passing away. Health: The state of being strong and fit enough to go about one’s daily activities and duties. 1.6 Summary The problem under study is the inappropriate recruitment and placement of personal to work with the elderly and handicap in assisted living facility. The proposal seeks to find ways of curbing the menace and the benefits that will come with placing the right professionals at the right positions in assisted living facilities to take care the elderly and handicap. The approach to collecting data for this study shall take a dual approach whereby the researcher shall make use of both qualitative and quantitative data collection procedures. Data shall be analyzed extensively by the use of quantitative data analyzed to give an empirical interpretation of data collected. Ultimately, the researcher shall come out with a code that should be used in the recruitment and selection of professionals into care homes. 2.0 Review of the Relevant Literature A number of research work and literature studies have gone on the issue of recruitment into assisted living facilities. Depending on the quarters of discussion, terminologies such as personal assistance services is used to replace care homes or assisted living facilities. The core aim of all these researches have however to scrutinize recruitment and placement in these facilities. Five of such literatures are briefly reviewed in this section. In the first place, StataCorp (2007), conducted a research in the social model of disability. The relation that this research has with the present proposal is in terms of the fact that the proposal want to find the place of the elderly and handicap in society so as to appreciate the need to offer the right and most appropriate care to them. In their research, the researchers discovered that “people with disabilities have a right to actively participate in, and contribute to society as equals and without dependence on family, institutions or charity” (Citizens Information Board, 2012). But for such goal to be achieved and for such right to be defended, the elderly and handicap must be in a position to proof that they can be independent. This where the need to resource the care homes with professionals who can give the elderly and handicap the needed assistance to be dependent is highly necessary. In another related literature Swedish Government Bill (1995), tried to investigate the philosophy behind independent living. The relation that that study has with the present proposal is that the present proposal is finding ways of establishing the psycho-social benefits that effective recruitment would bring to the elderly and handicap. This means that the needs of the elderly and the handicap to be independent transcend health reasons to include deeper psychological implications that can be explained with the philosophy of independent living. It is not surprising therefore that the Citizens Information Board (2012) establishes that “the philosophy of Independent Living is that of living like everyone else.” This includes the ability of the elderly and the handicap to have control of their own life, having opportunities to make decisions that affect their life and being able to pursue activities of their own choosing, regardless of disability (Citizens Information Board, 2012). The present researcher however holds the opinion that for such goal to be achieved there should be some competent and dedicated personal who are recruited to take up the training of the elderly and handicap to come to such a stage. On his part, Pinches (1995), worked on the accessibility of assisted living services. The research raised very looming picture of danger ahead. This is because the research concluded that there are several challenges that make access to care homes highly limited. Some of the challenges included the fact that the facilities lack necessary logistics and amenities and so even though the physical facilities exist, they are able to yield the needed and expected outcomes. What is more, it was discovered that most of these facilities need expansion to increase accommodation of inmates. However, very little plans are in place to achieve this. With such important revelations made, the present researcher will through this proposal and the subsequent research work find how inadequate and unqualified professionals in the homes contribute to limiting the rate at which more and more elderly and handicap people in various communities could access the facilities. Last but not least, World Health Organisation (2008) and Roos (2009), worked on the human resource development issues in assisted living facilities and the effect of bad recruitment in assisted living homes respectively. In the former, it was established that the responsibility of caring for the elderly and the handicap in care homes is a highly mandated task that cannot be approached from a perspective whereby ‘any’ person at all can be made to take up. Rather, the issue of taking care of the elderly and handicap should be seen as a profession that demands competent professional knowhow. For this reason, it is important that the training of these professionals be taken very seriously. It should also be based on the kind of qualification one has alone that should determine whether or not a person will be recruited to work in assisted living homes. More importantly, training and refresher programs should be made to continue even after placement so that professionals will be always up to date with latest practices in their profession. The latter on his part established that if the need to be proactive in recruitment into assisted living homes is refused, the elderly and handicap become deprived of their right to be taught to live independently and this may have other negative health and psycho-social effects. 3.0 Methodology The proposed research method for this research shall be quantitative survey. Such survey shall involve the collection of data from as many sources as possible. Unlike a case study, there shall be data from not just one destination. The reason for selecting a quantitative survey is in two main points. In the first place using survey as a research method gives the researcher the opportunity to proportionate the data collected so that it can be generalized to imply to all assisted living homes within the research community. To a large extent therefore, the current research is not investigating the issue of recruitment and placement of personal who work for the elderly and handicap in a specific assisted living facility but in all assisted living facilities. The second reason has to do with the use of quantitative research. With this kind of research, the researcher is in a better position to quantify all data to give it an empirical representation. This will indeed allow for a globalised interpretation of the research. 3.1 Participants The researcher shall use a random sampling procedure to select five assisted living facilities within the municipality of the researcher. The selection shall be done by writing names of all assisted living facilities on pieces of papers, mixing them up in a bowl and selecting five of them without looking into the bowl. The names of the facilities to be picked will be consulted and arranged for the research to take place there. Within each of the five facilities, the researcher shall select six personal. This time round, a purposive sampling procedure shall be used to ensure that the researcher gets specific personal to involve them in the data collection process. The targeted personal to be involved includes general managers, human resource managers, accounts managers, one long serving worker (more than five years of services) and two junior workers (less than five years of service). Then after, another random sampling technique shall be used to select six (6) inmates in each facility. This kind of selection shall be made to ensure a fair representation of the organizational hierarchy of the various facilities. 3.2 Research Design After selecting the sample size of sixty (60) respondents, the researcher shall put plans in place to ensure that the survey goes on in a well rehearsed but highly transparent manner. Transparency is very important for the survey because it is the anticipation of the researcher to generalize the findings to all assisted living facilities in the municipality. It is for this reason that the researcher shall use a random sampling technique to select the five (5) facilities. With a random sampling technique, the researcher shall not have an ideal about the kind of facilities that will be included and so there shall not be any form of bias with the data collected. For instance the researcher cannot target a particular facility where the researcher feels that collecting data from that source shall help in arriving at a confirmation to the hypothesis set. 3.3 Instrumentation and Data Collection Plans The research instrument to be used by the researcher in research shall be a questionnaire. Questionnaires have been identified as very ideal for collecting quantitative data (Swedish Social Insurance Agency, 2007).). This is because it makes it possible to easily quantify responses for analysis. The questionnaire shall be drafted in such a way that all the objectives of the research are captured in them through questions. Among other things, the questionnaire shall seek to find out the instituted formats in place by the facilities in terms of recruitment and placement. It shall also seek to find some of the basic considerations made in the course of recruiting new workers. For the care givers, the questionnaire shall seek to find more about their academic and professional background and look for correlations that these have on their work output. The inmates of the facilities shall be very useful persons for providing data on their feedback on the kind of service received in the facility. The questionnaire shall be distributed on a given day and then each respondent shall be given one week to complete. There shall be a brief seminar for the respondents to coach them on how to go about the responses. For instance independent responses will be encouraged. 3.4 Proposed Analysis of the Data Because this is going to be a quantitative research, the data analysis method shall also be a quantitative data analysis method. This way, the researcher shall decode all responses from the questionnaire and feed them into a Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software. The variables to be tested will include among other things, number of assistance received/given per week, gender, professional background, nationality, age, years of service, type of impairment and so on. The data analysis shall be biased towards drawing a relationship between the educational and professional background of care givers and the resulting nature of care they give to the elderly and the handicapped. 3.5 Implications and Limitations It is assumed that workers at the assisted living facilities whose background is not into social work would have some difficulty going about their duties and that such people would indicate a need for them to be transferred to other job openings that relates more to their experience. It is also assumed that due to the problem of understaffing, most general managers would accept any graduate at all for placement. Moreover, it is assumed that most human resource personnel would have very little career enhancement programs for their workers. With reference to limitations, it is predicted that not all respondents, especially the workers will be willing to give accurate answers that seem to expose their inadequacies at their post. It is therefore inherent on the researcher to use very tactical questions on the questionnaires that will not make his intentions to collect competence related questions so clear. REFERENCE LIST Altman, D. G. (2001). Practical statistics for medical research. New York: Chapman & Hall/CRC. Boston, J., Martin, J., Pallot, J., & Walsh, P. (1996). Public management: The New Zealand model. Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University Press. Citizens Information Board (2012). The Social Model of Disability. Assist Ireland. Accessed May 8, 2012 from http://www.assistireland.ie/eng/Information/Independent_Living/The_Social_Model_of_Disability/ Pinches, G. E. (1995). Essentials of Financial Management (5th ed). New York: Harper Collins College Publishers. Roos, J. M. (2009). Quality of personal assistance. Shaped by governments, markets and corporations. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. StataCorp. (2007). Stata Statistical Software: Release 10. College Station, TX:Stata Corpoation. Swedish government bill (1995). Regeringens proposition 1995/96:146: Vissa fragor om personlig assistans. (In Swedish). Stockholm: Thomson Fakta AB. Swedish Social Insurance Agency (2007). Assistance allowance. Retrieved May 8, 2012, from http://www.forsakringskassan.se/fakta/andra_sprak/assistans_eng/index.php World Health Organisation (2008). International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Retrieved May 8, 2012, from http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en. Read More