workforce
Tool’ s gold
A toolkit with steps designed to streamline work practices for aged care providers has received an A on its feedback report card.
Sara Charlesworth interviewed by Dallas Bastian
Small changes might be all providers need to make to improve job quality and the care provided in their services. This is the basis of a new toolkit that has been designed to assist aged care providers build sustainable, high-quality services. Professor Sara Charlesworth, from RMIT University and the University of South Australia, said frontline care workers are often employed in poor-quality jobs, with low pay, high time pressure and a lack of access to training and career opportunities.
“ This poor job quality creates significant challenges and barriers to both recruitment and retention and to care workers’ capacity to deliver high-quality care,” she said. Charlesworth, along with associate professor Deb King from Flinders University and researchers from the University of South Australia, collaborated with aged care providers Brightwater Care Group, HammondCare and Helping Hand, and aged care union United Voice to test small workplace innovations that underpin the toolkit.
Aged Care Insite sits down with Charlesworth to find out what the providers had to say about the changes and how they impacted job quality.
ACI: Why do we need interventions like the toolkit when it comes to job quality in aged and community care? SC: The impetus was our concern that in the quite considerable policy and funding transformations taking place in aged care, while they’ re very properly focused on improving the standards of care and, importantly, to ensure that service provision becomes more financially sustainable over the long term, there hadn’ t been much focus on the workforce, particularly the direct care workers … the personal care assistants, the community or home care workers. Yet we knew that the workforce and workers are crucial to both providing better quality of care and by making sure that we retain the aged care workers we currently have, but also attract more aged care workers into the future.
The toolkit was really about generalising the experience of our three aged care providers, and drawing on other Australian and international experience and evidence in this space. It’ s saying to the aged care sector:“ Don’ t forget about the workforce when we’ re moving rapidly through a period of change.” It seemed that there was scant attention paid to the workforce.
What are some of the small changes the toolkit prompts? We trialled a number of work design and work practice changes and they’ re set out in the toolkit and we use them as kind of case studies, for example, the development of specialised dementia care teams with one provider in the community care sector. That was aimed at providing consistency of care and building up the skills of a team of aged care workers who worked almost exclusively with dementia clients.
Another was about improving access to training on the job, so this organisation put on an additional personal care assistant and then provided the opportunity for the regular workers to be able to take short periods of time off; half an hour, an hour, a couple of hours. During their shift [ they were able ] to undertake specific modules, to be able to attend to any additional training they might need.
Another example was about community-based care worker mentoring. That this was system where three very experienced community care workers were paid more and put in a position
32 agedcareinsite. com. au