OLDER-ADULT PERSONAL SUPPORT WORKERS’ CONTRIBUTIONS DURING THE COVID-19 EMERGENCY RESPONSE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract When COVID-19 devastated long-term care facilities across Canada, most public attention was turned to older adult residents/clients, rather than their service providers, especially the personal support workers (PSWs). Some PSWs are over 55 age and above; they featured dual roles in the COVID-19 settings: (1) they were a vulnerable group disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and (2) they were essential workers providing support in the older-adult care facilities. Since current older-adult-driven research, practice, and policy have primarily focused on generalized assumptions of older adults as a vulnerable, passive, and dependent group rather than recognizing their diversity, expertise, assets, and experiences, this project aims to identify these older-adult PSWs’ contributions. This qualitative study invited 13 PSWs from older-adult care organizations in the Greater Toronto area of Canada to participate in in-depth interviews. This study uncovered three major contributions of older-adult PSWs within the individual-work-family triangulation. At the individual level, they bear the potentially high health risks of COVID-19, while supporting people around them. At the workplace level, they took on extra responsibilities to reduce the spread of the virus, dealing with the client’s/residents’ unfavourable behaviours and stress, and supporting their co-workers to maintain their organizations’ operations. At the family level, they worked overtime to compensate for their family members’ income loss and kept their family members at home to avoid infections. These outcomes inform the older adult research, practice, and policy by enhancing the appreciation of older adults’ diverse strengths and promoting older adults’ contributions in disaster settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".