Nursing homes throughout the Western world are seeing a steady increase in migrant workers. Although migrant staff members' multicultural background may be perceived and used by management as a resource in the workplace, studies indicate that the qualifications and competencies of these workers are often underestimated. Numerous studies have examined and theorized on the challenges related to workplace diversity and the deskilling of migrant workers. However, our knowledge of how competence may be conceptualized in inclusive ways in diverse staff groups remains scarce. This study examines minority and majority staff members' perceptions of competence in a strategically selected multicultural nursing home unit in Norway with 15-20 years of experience in recruiting and including minority staff members to various levels of the organization. We performed a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with 22 healthcare providers and found that in this nursing home unit, contrary to what has often been found in other organizations, competence was not primarily discussed as a matter of educational level or background, skin complexion or whether staff members spoke the majority language with a foreign accent. Rather, a competent care worker was perceived as a) having good professional knowledge on how to care for nursing home residents (regardless of the worker's educational level), b) either having the ability to speak well or working hard to improve one's skills in the majority language, c) exhibiting 'a genuine interest' in working in a nursing home despite the relatively harsh working conditions, and d) having the ability to prioritize to ensure that all tasks and duties were completed on each shift. Staff members' perceptions of competence were hence interrelated with educational, racial, linguistic and social dimensions, but in unexpected and transgressing ways, paving the way to ethnic equality among staff.

An increase in older people coupled with growing life expectancy has created a higher demand for long-term care (LTC) services in the global North. Recruitment of staff with an immigrant background has been a solution to meet this demographic challenge. Research shows that linguistic barriers and cultural differences can influence immigrant carers’ abilities to offer adequate care, while less is known about workplace training and intra-collegial support. This article explores systems and practices of training offered to new employees with immigrant backgrounds, and how the qualification process unfolds in daily work in nursing homes in Norway through an intersectional perspective focusing on the interlocking of gender, class and migrancy. The article shows that organizational conditions together with incomplete training combined with attitudes of ‘willful ignorance’ maintain privilege and oppression in these workplaces. The increased immigrant participation and their labor trajectories indicate the emergence of a new immigrant niche in the lower tiers of the LTC sector. The article contributes to the literature of migration, gender, healthcare services and labor by exploring immigrants’ situated labor experiences within changing institutional conditions in LTC.

Aim: Task interdependence among staff in nursing homes is high, and staff teams are typically composed of employees from different cultural backgrounds with varying levels of skills and qualifications. By applying relational coordination theory as an analytic lens, we investigated how communication and cooperation challenges are experienced and dealt with.Design: This is a qualitative study.Method: In‐dept interviews with 31 members of staff in two nursing homes and thematic analysis of the material.Results: The study identified challenges in direct communication and collaboration difficulties related to understanding how to use professional discretion in daily care practices in both nursing homes. The management in one of the two nursing homes arranged frequent meetings to share knowledge about the residents, their care status and introduced initiatives to build competence among all members of staff, including substitute and temporary staff. This contributed to ensuring shared goals and mutual respect at the workplace.

We investigated acculturative hassles in a community cohort of Vietnamese refugees in Norway (n = 61), exploring cross-sectional data and longitudinal predictors of acculturative hassles using data from their arrival in Norway in 1982 (T1), with follow up in 1985 (T2) and in 2005–2006 (T3). To our knowledge, this is the first longitudinal study of predictors of acculturative hassles in a refugee population. Results indicated that more communication problems and less Norwegian language competence were related to most hassles at T3. Higher psychological distress, lower quality of life, lower self-reported state of health, and less education at T3 were associated with higher levels of hassles at T3. More psychological distress at T2 and less education at arrival (T1) were significant predictors for more acculturative hassles at T3. These data suggest that addressing psychological distress during the early phase in a resettlement country may promote long-term refugee adjustment and, in particular, reduce exposure to acculturative hassles.

Background: The Norwegian government’s increased expectations that volunteering can be used as a means of integration and the scarce research regarding refugees’ experiences with volunteering is taken as the background for this study. Our purpose is to adopt a salutogenic perspective to investigate whether and how formal volunteering contributes to developing a sense of social inclusion and well-being among refugees in Norway. Methods: Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 12 volunteers with refugee backgrounds in a semi-rural district in Norway. Stepwise deductive induction was used for analysis. Results: Three themes were identified as a result of the analysis: (1) feeling safer due to increased knowledge regarding cultures, values, and systems and achieving mutual acceptance; (2) feeling more confident when communicating in Norwegian and contributing to society, and (3) feeling more connected via social relations. Conclusions: Our study indicates that participation in volunteering may contribute to social inclusion and that the participants’ resources and volunteering experiences may have a health-promotive impact under certain conditions.