Strategies to Improve Staff Retention in Long-term Care Facilities: Literature Review

a. Scenario A: You have just been hired as a manager in a long-term-care facility. One of the projects given to you by the executive director is to address high staff turnover rates. You realize that your knowledge of the reasons for turnover in long-term-care services is limited, and you decide to find evidence for strategies to improve staff retention. You plan to conduct a literature review based on the following questions: 

i. What factors are related to staff turnover in Canadian long-term care services?

ii. What strategies have been implemented, evaluated and shown effective for improving staff retention?

Using the AU library website, search the databases or citation indices for literature on the topic. (PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, Medline, PsycINFO, PLOS, and Cochrane Library are recommended to begin. Use other databases as needed.) Note that using the AU library will give you access to documents that may not be accessible to the public through other Internet search engines.

Try to find Canadian research first. If you cannot find adequate quality research, try to find research based on health systems similar to Canada (e.g., UK, Australia, etc.).

Search for research within the past five years first. If you cannot find adequate quality research, expand the search to the past 10 years.

Choose a few articles or reports related to your topic to support your introduction and provide background information for the paper. For example, if your topic is “long-term-care services for people with dementia,” you may want to use references in your introduction that indicate the prevalence of dementia in Canada, the availability of long-term-care facilities and/or the costs of long-term care. Such details help to provide background for your literature review.

Choose an additional 8–12 articles that are directly related to your chosen topic and research questions. Note that reviewing a greater number of articles will provide you with a better understanding of the knowledge available on your topic.

The articles may include experimental studies, observational studies, systematic reviews, qualitative studies, and government reports. Focus on original research.

Create an annotated bibliography with the 8–12 articles providing evidence for your research questions. Each citation should be formatted using APA guidelines and must include a link to the document through the AU library or the open access journal source. (Add the permalink to the article from the AU library by clicking on the citation title to open the document. Then click the link icon on the right side of the screen to show the permalink and copy the permalink into your assignment.) See the document below for examples of how to format the annotations. The annotated bibliography will be in the appendix of your paper.

Writing the Literature Review

Write your literature review paper following the format below:

1. Title page: Include the title of your paper describing your chosen topic, your name, student ID number, course name and number, and date.

2. Introduction: Introduce the topic and show its importance for health administration based on the chosen scenario. Use the published literature to support your statements. The introduction is approximately 1 page in length.

3. Literature review: Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate the knowledge on the topic to-date using the 8–12 articles related to the research questions. Use subheadings as needed to organize the review. Synthesize information and comment on the strengths/limitations (e.g., validity) of the evidence as appropriate. The review is approximately 4–5 pages in length.

4. Summary and recommendations: Describe the overall conclusions from the research literature reviewed and ways in which the research to-date has answered the research questions. Provide recommendations for your organization based on the chosen scenario. The introduction plus literature review and summary should be a maximum of six pages in length.

5. Reference list: Provide the reference list, in APA format, after the body of the paper (this is not the annotated bibliography). Provide complete references for any articles, books, electronic media, etc. that you cite in the body of your paper (including any course resources used in the paper).