The Impact of Nursing Home Culture Change: An Integrative Review

The Nursing Home Culture Change (NHCC) movement promotes a person- and relationship-centered approach and a small-scale, homelike model for NHs. The present study aimed to integrate the most recent empirical findings regarding the impact of NHCC on resident, staff, family, and organizational outcomes.

Integrative review.

Not applicable.

OVID MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Embase, and CINAHL databases were searched for quantitative or mixed studies published in English between 2018 and 2022 and examining the effect of NHCC on resident, staff, family, and/or organizational outcomes. A narrative and tabular synthesis of the results is provided.

A total of 1687 references were identified. Following duplicate removal, title and abstract screening, and full-text screening, 75 studies were retained for synthesis and suggest a positive impact of NHCC on resident (eg, quality of life and neuropsychiatric function), staff (eg, job satisfaction and stress), family (eg, satisfaction and depressive symptoms), and organizational (eg, NH attractiveness and occupancy rate) outcomes.

NHCC shows promising results in all studied outcome categories. Future research should further investigate obstacles to NHCC implementation, conduct cost-benefit analyses supported by appropriate statistical tests, and define ways to improve NH staff education as well as NH policies and regulations to better support NHCC initiatives.