The largest-ever survey of care home staff in England has found that neglectful behaviours towards patients are widespread.
For the study, researchers from University College London (UCL) asked 1,544 staff at 92 English care home units to anonymously detail positive and negative behaviours they had done or had witnessed colleagues doing. Participants completed the revised Modified Conflict Tactics Scale and Maslach Burnout Inventory.
According to the results, published in PLoS One, more than half of staff members surveyed said they had carrying out or observing potentially abusive or neglectful behaviours at least sometimes in the preceding three months. In 91 of the 92 care homes, abuse was said to occur “at least sometimes”.
The most common forms of neglect were making a resident wait for care (26%), avoiding a resident with challenging behaviour (25%), giving residents insufficient time for food (19%), and taking insufficient care when moving residents (11%). More than 1 per cent of staff reported physical abuse and 5 per cent reported verbal abuse. More staff reported abusive/neglectful behaviour in homes with higher staff burnout-depersonalisation scores (adjusted odds ratio 1.191; CI 1.052-1.349).
Positive behaviours were reported to be much more common than abusive behaviours, however some positive but time-consuming behaviours were notably infrequent. For instance, more than one in three care home staff were rarely aware of a resident being taken outside of the home for their enjoyment, and 15 per cent said activities were almost never planned around a resident's interests.
The study is part of the UCL MARQUE (Managing Agitation and Raising Quality of Life) cohort study, which is also looking at cost-effective interventions to improve the quality of care for people with dementia, and will be using this anonymous reporting as a measure of how well training interventions are working.