Interventions for Improving Working Environment in Home Care Work in Sweden – Preliminary Findings from the First Year: A Gender Perspective

Abstract

Home care services are an important part of the Swedish social welfare system. Considering the size of the sector and the increasing future needs for home care, due to growing elderly populations, it is worrisome that problems in terms of injuries, sick leave and staff turnover appear common in this occupation. A problem for managing the situation is, however, that the current knowledgebase is fragmented and not much developed being characterized by a homogenous workforce in terms of gender, dominated by women. A common perception is that this work is low skilled and something that can be done part time in parallel with household work. To improve the working environment in home care work, we initiated a project in which one of the goals was to create a better overview of published results of interventions and examples from community practice. Accordingly, we undertook a systematic review of the scientific literature with the purpose to find and map practical examples of interventions. The preliminary result suggests that there is a considerable lack of knowledge and often lacking, or poor, analyses of the consequences of the unequal gender balance in home care work. Interventions could be grouped into four types of interventions: scheduling, education and training, organizational change and digitization. Interestingly, it seems as if single problems at the workplace level to a larger extent are covered in the scientific literature while problems on the system level are more seldom addressed.