Challenges and opportunities for the multicultural aged care workforce
Researchers: Li Chen, Lily Xiao, Weifeng Han, Claudia Meyer, Amanda Muller
Population: Residential Aged Care
Funding support: Nil
Two systematic reviews are underway with the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at Flinders University, South Australia.
- Completed and published – challenges and opportunities for the multicultural aged care workforce: a systematic review and meta-synthesis. This review demonstrated its originality, innovation, methodological rigour and relevance across global contexts about how cultural competence in the multicultural aged care workforce shapes opportunities to build teamwork, peer support and experiences in cross-cultural encounters. Managers in aged care homes are in an ideal position to build an inclusive and egalitarian environment to facilitate staff adaptation to multicultural teams. Racism, discrimination and unfair treatment towards migrant staff have detrimental impacts on their health and well-being. In the absence of leadership and effective management, these issues can be ignored and remain unresolved. There is an imperative to develop human rights-based policies, standards, protocols and services at an organisational level, working to protect staff of diverse cultural backgrounds from all forms of discrimination, including racism. Developing cultural competence for all staff is a priority to foster workforce integration.
- Currently underway – communication experiences of people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in residential aged care. This review is at the data synthesis stage with a publication forthcoming
