About Re-Imagining Long-Term Residential Care
Led by Principal Investigator Pat Armstrong (York University), Re-Imagining Long-Term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices seeks to learn from/with the international community to identify promising practices for thinking about, planning and organizing care.
Long-term residential care is often considered as failure, failure of the individual to maintain themselves, failure of their family to care and failure of the medical system to cure. In these neoliberal times, residents tend to be viewed as a growing burden to the system and workers are often viewed as an expense to be controlled and managed.
Long-term care policy is moving target of change that affects us all. It is a gender issue, it is a social issue, and it is a political issue. Our study reflects these complexities.
This study is a major collaborative research initiative funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Research Areas
Our investigation is organized around four broad and overlapping themes that our scholars from nursing, medicine, social work, sociology, architecture, philosophy, history, cultural studies and others on our team will study. We are looking at:
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Approaches to Care
How is long-term care organized in different countries? What is familial, bio-medical and/or social care? What is left for markets to provide? What constitutes necessary, appropriate, effective and efficient care? How do ideas of gender, individual and family responsibility, citizenship and self-worth come into play?
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Work Organization
What is the impact of new regulatory regimes? Designs for physical space? What are the issues facing full-time and part-time work workers? What are workers’ credentials and who does what? What whistle-blowing mechanisms are in place?
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Accountability
How do care systems address issues of accountability and democracy? Do they operate in reciprocal fashion, with residents and their families at the centre of accountability measures?
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Financing and Ownership
Which capital and operating funding mechanisms and models are most likely to promote equitable access to care? What are the effects of for–profit, not-for-profit and public forms of ownership as they exist in different regions and countries?
The Research Team
25 co-investigators have worked on the Re-imagining Long-Term Care project.
