The Impact of the Pandemic on care homes

This doctoral thesis builds on the findings of the Resicovid-19 project. Resicovid-19 project aims to evaluate the impact of the pandemic on people living in old age, dependency and mental health care homes in Catalonia, as well as on their families, workers and organisations. On the basis of the lessons learnt, it also aims to build proposals for improving care and the care model.

The qualitative research within the project focuses on the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic of the people who live and work in long-term care homes as well as family members. It also includes the perspectives of those workers that left their jobs due to burnout and family members who lost a resident during this period. It explores the psychosocial and health effects according to different axes of inequality (gender, age, social class, migration status, disability) thus having an intersectional perspective (Hankivsky and Kapilashrami, 2020; Maestripieri, 2021).

The thesis focuses on the experiences of care (whether workers or through informal ways of care like family membres) during the COVID-19 pandemic in long-term care institutions; the daily life during the COVID-19 pandemic in long-term care institutions and social connectivity and imagineries of good care in residents, family members, care workers and stakeholders in a world transformed by COVID-19.