• Project number: F 2541
• Institution: Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA)
• Status: Ongoing Project
• Planned end: 2024-12-31

Description:

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated professional caregivers' work strain and confronted inpatient care facilities with a number of additional challenges, including dealing with contact restrictions or implementing the social distance regulations.

From an occupational safety and health perspective, there is a strong interest in gathering knowledge about interventions implemented to handle these challenges and their consequences for care facilities as well as professional caregivers. Due to the risk of future pandemics this knowledge is of great importance.

The project specifically focuses on interventions referring to changes in aspects of work organisation since many may be developed and implemented by healthcare facilities themselves. This includes both digitally and non-digitally supported interventions.

As a first step, a retrospective mixed-method multilevel study including qualitative expert interviews, document analyses and quantitative surveys with professional caregivers and their superiors will be conducted.

Subsequently, higher-level insights on work organisation options for managing pandemics or crises in inpatient care will explored. This occurs within the framework of scenario workshops with nursing experts and practitioners as well as based on findings regarding crisis management in other sectors.

The project thus ties in with current occupational safety and health activities of other groups of national actors such as the National Prevention Conference (Nationale Präventionskonferenz, NPK) and the Council of the Working World (Rat der Arbeitswelt, RdA) which call for a strengthening of social cooperation with regard to "health promotion and prevention in care" (NPK) or a "structural strengthening of occupational health and safety in professional care" (RdA).