Merciful yet effective elderly care performance management practices

Purpose – The study aims to compare management practices in private and publicly owned elderly care homes. The demands for cost-effective care combined with emphasis on client experience highlights the importance of appropriate management practices. Design/methodology/approach – The study utilises a survey of 500 homes covering management practices on monitoring, performance management and staff development. These are highly correlated, allowing for treating the practices both in aggregate and individually in the analysis. Additional questions capture information on site and management conditions. Findings – Management practices employed at the elderly care homes vary greatly, with high and low individual scores found in most homes. But private homes consistently score higher than public homes, especially when it comes to incentive practices. Also, elderly care homes of both ownership forms score at the top and bottom of each management practice. But looking at the average management score, there are fewer private homes that score really low and more private homes that score really high. Practical implications – The results identify given characteristics and maturity of the various management practices employed to plan and control operations in the elderly care homes and provides managerial and staff insights into their use. Originality/value – The application and impact of standard management practices has previously been limited in publicly funded services. Little is known about management practices in elderly care and whether the practices are associated with better performance.