Bibliographic record
Abstract
Personal support workers (PSWs) are essential healthcare workers who provide the majority of direct care for Canada’s most vulnerable populations and thus are a critical part of the health workforce in Canada. As the Canadian population continues to age, there is a growing demand for this workforce to provide direct care for Canadians, including care in the long-term care (LTC) setting at the end of life. Despite this, PSWs' role within the Canadian context, and internationally, remains unclear. The role of PSWs has evolved concurrently with greater demands for complex institutional care. Consequently, the role of PSWs is increasingly unclear, with varying levels of responsibilities and autonomy reported based on the clinical setting and geographic location. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to understand PSWs’ role in end-of-life care in an LTC home in Ontario, Canada. This study aimed to answer the research question: what are PSWs’, nursing staff’s, managers’, administrators’, family members’, and residents’ perspectives on the role of PSWs in end-of-life care in an Ontario LTC home? A qualitative descriptive single case study was conducted virtually to describe and understand the experiences and perspectives of participants relating to the role of PSWs in end-of-life care. A conceptual framework, named the role behaviour framework, was used as the descriptive framework to guide the design, data collection, and data analysis. Multiple forms of data were collected using virtual methods, including study site characteristics, documentation data, archival records, demographic data, semi-structured individual interviews, and observation of physical artifacts. A descriptive framework data analysis strategy using the role behaviour framework was applied to guide and construct knowledge on the role of PSWs in end-of-life care in LTC. The findings highlight that LTC residents, family members and staff acknowledge that PSWs perform tasks outside their job description when providing end-of-life care; specifically for tasks that support the “experience of comfort” and “being at peace.” These extra-role behaviours performed by PSWs were perceived to improve the quality of end-of-life care that residents receive and were found to most likely be conducted because of the familial relationship between residents and PSWs. This study's findings revealed that as the role of PSWs continues to expand and evolve, there is less time and capacity for PSWs to perform social or relational care tasks; therefore, PSWs start to perform more tasks outside their role boundary.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".