The focus of our study was to examine personal assistants and group home assistants experiences of stress at work, how they cope with stress and how it affects the relationship with the care recipient. The study is made out of a qualitative frame and based on interviews with two personal assistants and four group home assistants. Our theoretical perspectives consist of Aaron Antonovsky’s SOC theory, Richard Lazarus theory about coping and also sociologist Johan Asplund’s theory about social interaction. The result indicates that the experiences of stress are individual and varied among the participants while the presence of stress at work is a shared apprehension. The Main reasons for the emergence of stress are related to workload, diffuse information, work-tasks and staff exchange. Coping-strategies that are used to reduce the experiences of stress are spread between both problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping while the latter is more frequently applied. Social Support has a vital part in the staff’s management of stress. Colleagues, supervisors and other people in their close environment are presented as important resources.  Our final conclusion is that stress has an impact on the relationship with the recipient of care because of the close interaction they have with each other. The close interaction with the recipient of care may however itself be a powerful stress factor due to the fact that the work itself is characterized by close interaction and it would be an impossibility to not be affected by it.

The aim of the study was to describe how managers at the eldercare system especially in nursing homes work to ensure high quality care. For this purpose, a qualitative method was used in this study and four managers at nursing home have been interviewed. Previous studies have shown that managers in some cases are restricted in their actions and that this may slow down the improvement of the care. At the same time the managers describe their work as demanding and diverse. They have a significant staff responsibility, meaning that they have to ensure the quality of care.  In this study, some previous results have been confirmed for example that the managers feel that they have an impact on the quality of care, that managers value their contacts with staff, patients and relative highly and that their main purpose is the quality of care. The data was analyzed using one of many role theories and with different descriptions of leadership. The results show that the managers are working to ensure that the quality of the care is high by ensuring that the staff is competent, participating in development meetings, maintaining good contact with serval actors like staff, patients and relative, providing staff training courses and involving the staff in developing a more productive environment. Therefore, the managers have more impact on how good the quality of the care is than one might think.