Is the Systemic Agency Capacity of Long-Term Care Organizations Enabling Person-Centered Care during the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Repeated Cross-Sectional Study of Organizational Resilience

The COVID-19 pandemic has strained long-term care organization staff and placed new demands on them. This study examines the role of the general ability and power of a long-term care organization to act and react collectively as a social system, which is called systemic agency capacity, in safeguarding the provision of person-centered care during a crisis. The question of how the systemic agency capacity of long-term care organizations helps to ensure person-centered care during the pandemic is an open research question. We conducted a pooled cross-sectional study on long-term care organizations in Germany during the first and second waves of the pandemic (April 2020 and December 2020–January 2021). The sample consisted of 503 (first wave) and 294 leaders (second wave) of long-term care organizations. The top managers of these facilities were asked to report their perceptions of their facility’s agency capacity, measured by the AGIL scale, and the extent to which the facility provides person-centered care. We found a significant positive association between the leaders’ perceptions of systemic agency capacity and their perceptions of delivered person-centered care, which did not change over time. The results tentatively support the idea that fostering the systemic agency capacity of long-term care organizations facilitates their ability to provide quality routine care despite environmental shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic.