Precarity in elderly care - split shifts and its effects on employees

Problems with precarious employment have been highlighted in research in recent years. The term has included e.g. temporary employees, part-time employees, temporary staff. Precarious work accommodates and insecurity for the employees.

A potentially precarious job that has not been included is work with split shift, which means that the working day is divided into two parts.Split shifts are common in elderly care, which is an industry that previous studies have shown has work environment problems. Split shifts appear to be common in elderly care, but knowledge of the effect of split shifts on employees is scarce.

The research that exists on split shifts is partly contradictory and shows different results.The purpose of the studies is to investigate how (in)security is expressed, experienced, and dealt with among assistant nurses and care assistants with split shits in elderly care in Sweden.The project is based on insecurity theories that have been developed through readings of research on precarious work.

The project will investigate whether and if so, how split shifts can lead to these types of insecurity and whether they experience other types of insecurity.A mixed method will be used and both interviews and survey data will be analyzed.

Interviews will be conducted with care assistants and assistant nurses in elderly care who has split shifts.The interviews will be used to understand experiences of insecurity.

The answers from the interviews will be used to develop an existing questionnaire that was previously used to investigate the groups work environment. The questionnaire will be sent out to a representative sample of employees in elderly care.

The statistical analysis will examine whether split shifts increase the risk of insecurity and which situations the risk is increased.The project will contribute new knowledge about precarious work, about shared work trips, and how insecurity is formed and created in elderly care.