Health Services Systems and Policy Research Seminar Series

The contexts within which we work and live can exert profound influences on our health and well-being; they can affect our perceptions, our interactions with others, our experiences, our behaviours, and our general functioning and performance. Environments in which long-term care is provided to older Canadians, including nursing homes, are places in which individuals both work and live – where care providers work to sustain older Canadians’ quality of life, and the care of older Canadians who live in these environments is the focus of work. The quality of care and life of nursing home residents has been a focus for researchers for decades, and the quality of work life of care workers and workforce sustainability in long-term care has been identified more recently as a global issue. This seminar series focuses on examining what we know about the influences of work environments on workers providing care in nursing homes, and on the residents who are the recipients of their care.  We consider the influences of two facets of nursing home environments, psychosocial and physical-built, which have historically been the focus of disparate disconnected disciplines. Psychosocial features include perceived organizational support, perceived supervisor support, social connectedness, and work affect while physical-built features include workspace configurations and navigability, ventilation, and lighting. We contend that there are important interactions amongst features of the psychosocial and physical-built environments that influence both worker and resident outcomes.  Contributors to this year’s seminar series derive from a variety of disciplines including gerontology, health services research, architecture, building design, industrial design, environmental psychology, and work and organizational psychology.

Impacts of Nursing Home Environments on Older Adults: Fall 2023 seminars (1 to 4) will focus on the impacts of nursing home environments on older adults, relating to the influences of the physical (built and naturalized) and psychosocial environments on older adult health and quality of life in aging environments.

Impacts of Nursing Home Work Environments on Workers: Winter 2024 seminars (5 to 8) will focus on the impacts of nursing home work environments on workers, relating to the influences of the physical (built and naturalized) and/or psychosocial work environments on quality of work-life, health, mental health, and well-being.

Many of the presenters will also consider one or more of the following themes:

• Building Supportive Systems— the necessary actions to realize possible improved futures for work and life, for older adults and care providers, in aging environments.
• Health Human Resources—the factors impacting the management and organization of care providers (‘health human resources’) in aging environments.
• Balancing Environmental Imperatives—the challenges of balancing the imperatives of ‘salutogenesis’ (health-promoting features) and ‘pathogenesis’ (disease-causing features) in aging environments.