The Winding Road to Professionalisation: Care Work in Romanian Nursing Homes

Abstract

Across Central and Eastern Europe, the expansion of formal long‐term care provision has intensified questions regarding the organisation, recognition, and professionalisation of care work. Romania offers a particularly relevant case, as the rapid growth of residential care for older persons has created new institutional spaces where care is increasingly organised as paid work. Despite the legal regulation of occupations in this field, occupational roles overlap in practice, and employers recruit a substantial share of workers without prior qualifications, while skills are acquired through short courses, peer learning, and on‐the‐job experience. This article examines these processes of professionalisation in Romanian nursing homes, focusing on how overlapping roles, emotional labour, and tacit knowledge shape everyday care practice. Drawing on qualitative interviews with care workers and managers in private nursing homes, the findings reveal fluid professional boundaries, with medical, non‐medical, and relational responsibilities frequently overlapping. Professionalisation emerges slowly and unevenly, not through institutional reform or credentialisation alone, but through workers’ everyday adaptation, informal learning, and the practical negotiation of professional roles under conditions of labour shortages and limited institutional support.