| Career Paths of Geriatric Nurses
Sponsor
Federal Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth |
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Duration
12 2007 – 05 2009 |
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As a result of demographic changes, experts anticipate a growing demand for trained personnel in the sector of care for the elderly. The increasing retention within the profession and the reintegration of unemployed skilled labour may possibly represent valuable resources to cope with this impending labour shortage. However, so far no representative statistics on professional biographies for geriatric nurses have been made available. There is no reliable data on how long geriatric nurses actually work in their profession after finishing their training, on their reasons for a career change, nor on how many of them interrupt their career and, if so, for how long. But this data is essential to predict the future demand for job training programs. This project aims to close this information gap to enable the parties concerned to take appropriate action.
The project analyses the professional biographies of geriatric nurses by combining different research methods, using three successive research modules to form a self-contained research unit.
The fourth module served as a unit to discuss the results with experts in the field of care for the elderly, to formulate acceptable solutions to the problem and to further develop relevant research questions.
Module I:
This qualitative research module explores the field through interviews with geriatric nurses and experts. It aims to generate typical career history sequences, representative patterns and make assumptions about professional geriatric care careers in general.
Module II:
The random sample of employees (IAB Employee Sample) was evaluated with respect to career duration, discontinuation, workload and time of career termination.
Module III:
This module enlarges upon the topic of temporary career discontinuation and subsequent job re-entry. To this end, telephone interviews were conducted with geriatric nurses.
Module IV:
Two workshops were held with experts having practical experience in various relevant sectors. The workshops’ theme was “manager training” and “re-activating and mobilizing work re-entrants”. The experts evaluated the findings of the empirical studies in modules I, II and III, defining possible ranges of intervention and specifying coordinated steps to be taken in various spheres of the geriatric care sector.
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