Supporting the resilience and retention of frontline care workers in care homes for older people: A scoping review and thematic synthesis

The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the need to ensure that strategic and operational approaches to retain high quality, resilient frontline care home workers, who are not registered nurses, are informed by context specific, high quality evidence. We therefore conducted this scoping review to address the question: What is the current evidence for best practice to support the resilience and retention of frontline care workers in care homes for older people? MEDLINE, PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, MedRxiv, CINAHL, ASSIA, Social Science Premium were searched for literature published between 2010 and 2020. The search strategy employed combinations of search terms to target frontline care workers in care homes for older people and the key concepts relevant to resilience and retention were applied and adapted for each database. Thirty studies were included. Evidence for best practice in supporting the resilience and retention specifically of frontline care workers in care homes is extremely limited, of variable quality and lacks generalisability. At present, it is dominated by cross-sectional studies mostly from out with the UK. The small number of intervention studies are inconclusive. The review found that multiple factors are suggested as being associated with best practice in supporting resilience and retention, but few have been tested robustly. The thematic synthesis of these identified the analytical themes of – Culture of Care; Content of Work; Connectedness with Colleagues; Characteristics and Competencies of Care Home Leaders and Caring during a Crisis. The evidence base must move from its current state of implicitness. Only then can it inform intervention development, implementation strategies and meaningful indicators of success. High quality, adequately powered, co-designed intervention studies, that address the fundamentally human and interpersonal nature of the resilience and retention of frontline care workers in care homes are required. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement No external funding ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below: n/a All necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable. Yes Available by contacting the author(s)