Background

The delivery of services at home for people who require long-term care is becoming more significant in Germany on account of demographic changes and the growing proportion of elderly people who wish to live in their own homes for as long as possible. At the same time the specialist literature on work and health in the home care industry highlights a clear need for conditions to be improved in this field.
Home care workers, many of whom come from outside Germany, earn their living by travelling to private households, where they support and look after people in need of long-term care. They are a group that have received little attention from ergonomics research until now, but are probably subject to heavy workloads in the domiciliary care settings where they perform their tasks.

There have been no quantitative data available so far on the working and health situations of the 300,000-600,000 people Steiner et al. (2019) estimate to be doing jobs of this kind in Germany. The study aimed to contribute to closing this knowledge gap.

Conduct and aims of the study

Data on the working and health situations of home care workers in Germany were gathered by carrying out an online survey in June and July 2023, which the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizin, BAuA) ran with support from the Berlin-based organisation Minor - project office for education and research (Minor - Projektkontor für Bildung und Forschung). 429 home care workers from Poland, Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania took part in the survey.

The aim was to produce an objective, factually based overview of the working and health situations of home care employees in Germany.

The study, one of a series of research projects conducted by BAuA’s Unit 3.3 on work organisation in Germany's health system, therefore addressed the need to strengthen the foundations for round-the-clock care in the family home that had been identified in the German Federal Government’s 2021 coalition agreement. From the perspective of ergonomics, it was intended to help improve working conditions for individuals employed in care and the wider health sector. Furthermore, it generated findings about home care employees who work in domiciliary settings as a specific group. The data collected forms the basis for deriving recommendations for improving the work situation of home care workers.

Study results published in four fact sheets

We have published four fact sheets in German summarising the results arrived at concerning home care employees’ working and health situations (download below). Additionally, the fact sheets are available in the four languages of the respondents' countries of origin (Polish, Bulgarian, Croatian, and Romanian).