The development and evaluation of an interpersonal person-centered care intervention for geriatric nurse aides

Abstract

Person-centered caregiving is a construct that is currently being defined and operationalized in the gerontology literature and in long-term care. The goal of this study was to further define interpersonal person-centered care by developing and pilot testing a training intervention for geriatric nurse aides. The training was developed to incorporate content regarding person-centered behaviors, knowing the residents, and understanding relationships. Specific materials used in the training were videos to model person-centered care, personalized resident videobiographies, and personalized videos of caregiving interactions between the nurse aides and the residents. The pilot testing of this intervention was implemented by using a quasiexperimental, waitlist control design in two nursing homes, Catholic Care and St. Joseph. The outcome measures included two behavioral observation measures for assessing person-centered care: the Person-Centered Care Inventory and the Global Behavioral Scale. Additional outcome measures included: dyadic measures of relational closeness and relationship satisfaction, nurse aide job satisfaction, and resident satisfaction with care. The findings indicate that the training intervention was successful in increasing both the nurse aides’ and residents’ sense of relationship closeness, as well as their relationship satisfaction. However, the nurse aides’ person-centered caregiving behaviors care did not increase reliably. One explanation may be that the sampling of the nurse aides’ caregiving behaviors was too small to provide an adequate test of the hypothesized increase. It is possible that relationship closeness increased as a result of the combination of encouraging the nurse aides and residents to think of themselves as being in a relationship as well as the specific content of the training intervention.