Digital Matching for live-in care

Abstract: In Austria, 25,000 to 30,000 people being cared for by live-in caregivers. Live-in caregivers are defined as workers who are employed to provide care services to elderly and disabled people living in their private households. Activities in home care are predominantly carried out by immigrant women because of the special conditions that home care provides. These conditions can have many positive aspects for both the care workers and the care recipients, if they are well and appropriately matched to the skills of the caregivers and the needs of the persons being cared for. The live-in caregivers in Western countries come mostly from Eastern Europe. On the one hand, because of the worldwide shortage of qualified care workers and, on the other hand, due to the higher wages in contrast to their home countries and the prospects that such a position brings with it.However, they can also bear risks of dependency on their employers, leading to isolation, on-call work, and the risk of exploitation, while putting live-in care workers in a particularly vulnerable position with respect to immigration policy. Working conditions are often extremely harsh, with fees and contracts strictly regulated by recruiting agencies.Live-in care workers are an important but forgotten sector of long-term care. Without improving their working conditions, we will not be able to provide affordable, quality care to citizens, who are very urgently in need of this service. Even though this is often the only affordable solution for affected families. In order to improve the working conditions and to ensure that the caregivers continue to be employed in households that best match their skills and aspirations, we have created a new live-in care matching platform. Before creating the platform, we conducted focus group interviews to find out what is important to the stakeholders.Together with families of people in need of care and care workers, we developed a platform that meets the requirements of both sides and optimally supports both sides in the placement process. Here, both caregivers and persons in need of care (or their families) have the opportunity to disclose what they value, what skills they possess and what special features there are by answering a questionnaire. Using an innovative matching algorithm, the platform selects the ideal combination of caregivers and persons in need of care. In this paper, we will analyze the results of the focus group interviews in more detail, elaborate on the lessons learned and discuss which attributes play a particular role in the matching process based on our algorithm. In the future, the process should be simplified for both parties and will serve as a validation for the stakeholders

Keywords: live-in care, care-giver, care-worker, digital matching, algorithm, humanfactor, empowerment

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1002579

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