THE IMPACT OF NEIGHBOURHOOD TEAM DEVELOPMENT ON RESIDENT QUALITY-OF-LIFE IN LONG-TERM CARE

Abstract

By the year 2024, one in four adults in Canada will be over the age of 65. In Ontario alone, 100,000 residents live in long-term care (LTC). Residents sometimes experience poor quality-of-life (QOL). Culture change has been proposed as an approach to improve residents’ QOL in LTC. One large LTC organization, Schlegel Villages, has developed and implemented an organizational culture change called Neighbourhood Team Development (NTD). This approach focuses on building cross-functional teams to enhance resident-centredness and promote QOL through optimizing residents’ autonomy and dignity. Implementation of NTD started in 2013 in six LTC homes. The aim of this secondary analysis was to evaluate if NTD has an impact on residents’ QOL in LTC. Using a quantitative repeated-measures design, residents from six LTC homes completed QOL assessments. Quantitative data were collected through the Resident Assessment Instrument-Minimum Data Set 2.0 (RAI-MDS) and the interRAI QOL Survey Short Form. QOL data were analyzed using a paired t-test to assess change scores between time point 1 (data collected between August 2011 and December 2012) and time point 2 (data collected between January 2014 and November 2015) for 232 residents. Study results demonstrate that NTD increased residents’ QOL (p = .003). Organizational culture change such as NTD can lead to innovative approaches to improve the QOL of residents in LTC. This study contributes to literature examining culture change in LTC, and helps inform LTC care models, and interventions to increase residents’ QOL in LTC.