Omsorgsgivares känsla av sammanhang inom äldreomsorgen i skuggan av New Public Management : En kvantitativ studie i socialt arbete

Sammanfattning: This study is about the upcoming challenge Sweden face with a population that grows older and in need of elderly care. The challenge lies in that municipality, as it is today, won’t have the personnel to care for the elders. The study presents two problematic factors that need change for the municipality to be able to guarantee reasonable living standards according to social laws. The first factor is the decreasing profession attractiveness that makes it hard to employ personnel. The second factor, which the study focuses on, is the fact the caregivers are overrepresented in the social insurance office statistics of personnel on sick leave. We choose to focus on the caregiver’s work environment to get a perspective on the problem. To be more exact the study focuses on finding a covariance between experienced New Public Management and Sense of coherence. Our second focus is to see if there is an underlying relation between the experienced New Public Management reforms and the three parts of Sense of coherence; meaningfulness, comprehensibility and manageability. A third focus is to see if the relationship is influenced by the caregivers’ age and work experience. Our main findings are that experienced New Public Management has both positive but mainly negative effect on caregivers’ sense of coherence and therefore on caregiver’s health. Our conclusion is therefore that New Public Management can be seen as a factor for care givers high ratings in the social security offices statistics over sick leave from work.