BACKGROUND: Attracting and supporting a sustainable long-term care (LTC) workforce has been a persistent social policy challenge across the globe. To better attract and retain a sustainable LTC workforce, it is necessary to adopt a unified concept of worker well-being. Meaning of work is an important psychological resource that buffers the negative impacts of adverse working conditions on workers\' motivation, satisfaction, and turnover intention. The aim of this study was to explore the positive meaning of care work with older people and its implications for health care workers\' job satisfaction and motivation to work in the LTC sector.
METHODS: This study adopted a qualitative descriptive design that pays particular attention to health care workers; such as nurses, personal care workers; as active agents of the meaning making and reframing of care work in LTC communities in a East Asia city. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirty health care workers in LTC communities in Hong Kong. Thematic analysis was employed for data analysis.
RESULTS: The research findings indicate that while health care workers perform demanding care work and experience external constraints, they actively construct positive meanings of care work with older people as a helping career that enables them to facilitate the comfortable aging of older people, build affectional relationships, achieve professional identity, and gain job security.
CONCLUSIONS: This qualitative study explores how health care workers negotiate the positive meaning of older people care work and the implications of meaningful work for workers\' job satisfaction and motivation to work in the LTC sector. The importance of a culturally sensitive perspective in researching and developing social policy intervention are suggested.

From the stress of burnout to the gratification of camaraderie, medicine is suffused with emotions that educators, administrators, and reformers have sought to shape. Yet historians of medicine have only begun to analyze how emotions have structured health care work. This introductory essay frames a special issue on health care practitioners\' emotions in the twentieth-century United Kingdom and United States. We argue that the massive bureaucratic and scientific changes in medicine after the Second World War helped to reshape affective aspects of care. The articles in this issue emphasize the intersubjectivity of feelings in healthcare settings and the mutually constitutive relationship between patients\' and providers\' emotions. Bridging the history of medicine with the history of emotion demonstrates how emotions are instilled rather than innate, social as well as personal, and, above all else, change over time. The articles reckon with the power dynamics of healthcare. They address the policies and practices that institutions, organizations, and governments have implemented to shape, govern, or manage the affective experiences and well-being of healthcare workers. And they point to important new directions in the history of medicine.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused Japanese workers psychological distress through crises of health, economics, and social relationships. To assess whether these effects are amplified by the gender bias that exists in Japan, we examined male and female worker\'s psychological distress and difficulties during the pandemic. An online \"COVID-19-related difficulties\" questionnaire, based on item response theory, gathered responses from 3464 workers in October and November 2020. The workers\' psychological distress was found concerned to be significantly worse than before the pandemic. Basic stressors related to infection anxiety, economic anxiety, and restrictions on social interactions and outings. Men\'s and women\'s experiences of difficulties were consistent with traditional gender roles in Japan: men were more likely to face job-related stressors, such as economic insecurity and work-style changes; women were more likely to face non-job-related stressors, such as increased living costs and reduced social interactions. Policymakers and employers should consider the association between gender differences and industry types, and implement measures to strengthen the acceptability of mental health care.

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This article is the Presidential Address to the 2018 meeting of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine at the University of Regina. It examines the organization of the nursing service in Newfoundland during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the recruitment and retention of nurses in cottage hospitals and nursing stations in outport communities. A number of interconnected strategies were used by the Newfoundland government to staff the nursing service, including recruiting internationally educated nurses, adjusting expectations with respect to registration standards, and using both trained and untrained workers to support nurses\' labour. Although this article is intended more as a reconnaissance suggesting the possibilities of such research, it does analyze the interconnected issues of geography, funding and pay, the nursing shortage, and the renegotiation of nursing labour that characterized this period. Furthermore, although this is a case study of Newfoundland and Labrador, it is worth considering how, or whether, the linked strategies used in the province were transferable to other communities across rural, remote, or northern Canada.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this paper is to explore how leadership is practiced across four different hospital units.
METHODS: The study is a comparative case study of four hospital units, based on detailed observations of the everyday work practices, interactions and interviews with ten interdisciplinary clinical managers.
RESULTS: Comparing leadership as configurations of practices across four different clinical settings, the author shows how flexible and often shared leadership practices were embedded in and central to the core clinical work in all units studied here, especially in more unpredictable work settings. Practices of symbolic work and emotional support to staff were particularly important when patients were severely ill.
CONCLUSIONS: Based on a study conducted with qualitative methods, these results cannot be expected to apply in all clinical settings. Future research is invited to extend the findings presented here by exploring leadership practices from a micro-level perspective in additional health care contexts: particularly the embedded and emergent nature of such practices.
CONCLUSIONS: This paper shows leadership practices to be primarily embedded in the clinical work and often shared across organizational or professional boundaries.
CONCLUSIONS: This paper demonstrated how leadership practices are embedded in the everyday work in hospital units. Moreover, the analysis shows how configurations of leadership practices varied in four different clinical settings, thus contributing with contextual accounts of leadership as practice, and suggested \"configurations of practice\" as a way to carve out similarities and differences in leadership practices across settings.

This paper addresses the gap in health services and policy research about the implications of everyday weather for health care work. Building on previous research on the weather-related challenges of caregiving in homes and communities, it examines the experiences of \'seasonal bad weather\' for health care workers in long-term care institutions. It features a hermeneutic phenomenology analysis of six transcripts from interviews with nurses and personal support workers from a qualitative study of institutional long-term care work in rural Canada. Focussing on van Manen\'s existential themes of lived experience (body, relations, space, time), the analysis reveals important contradictions between the lived experiences of health care workers coping with bad weather and long-term care policies and practices that mitigate weather-related risk and vulnerability. The findings contribute to the growing concern for rural health issues particularly the neglected experiences of rural health providers and, in doing so, offer insight into the recent call for greater attention to the geographies of health care work.