“
where they then provided direct peer
support to workers out in the field.
If you have a new worker, or you
Don’t forget
have a new client, the buddy
mentor would go with the
about the
worker the first time to meet
workforce when
that new client or to help a new
we’re moving rapidly worker through the process
through a period
of learning about community-
based
care work. It’s just providing
of change.
that extra level of confidence and
building both the capacity and the
capability of the workers.
Another was in a residential setting and was concerned about
improving the quality of care from a person-centred perspective
for the resident. This mapping was used and typically in
organisations often the direct-care workers get left out of that, so
you might have the managers working with the family and maybe
the OTs or the physios, for example, but the people who spend
most time with the residents are often not included in that kind of
case planning, that case management process.
Interestingly the [care workers’] main feedback was “we now
feel really valued”, and the managers and some of the other allied
health groups were saying: “Gee, we didn’t actually realise how
much they knew and understood about this particular resident”.
They were some of small-scale changes we put in place. The
toolkit outlined six steps towards improving job quality and the
most important is taking that first step for organisations and work
units within those organisations, to take the time to reflect and
review how things sit in terms of job quality
The toolkit provides some useful models and tools to do that
initial review and then through the other steps, reflect and engage.
Through the various steps it’s building capacity within
organisations to be able to monitor changes effectively.
Sometimes you can use data, such as sickness or absenteeism
rates, but they’re fairly crude. If you’ve got high absenteeism
rates in a unit that tells you something’s wrong, it doesn’t tell you
what’s wrong. It tells you in a broad sense that morale is low, but it
doesn’t tell you why morale is low.
It’s really trying to help organisations to say: this is not frightening.
There are tools out there and the toolkit provides plenty of links to
tried-and-tested tools both in Australia and internationally.
You trialled the toolkit across three aged care providers.
What other kinds of feedback did you receive from
management and care staff?
The toolkit wasn’t trialled with the aged care providers. It built and
drew on their experience of them trialling some small-scale initiatives.
They were the guinea pigs, if you like. It was an iterative process, so
we could work out what was the most effective way to do this.
We started with the agreed six interventions in each organisation
and the feedback from management and care staff was different
depending on the organisation and the intervention. For example,
I mentioned the organisation that had trialled the buddy mentoring
or the peer-to-peer mentoring, with its community care workers
in a particular geographical location. The feedback was terrific.
The organisational data showed that incompatibilities reduced
and being able to better match care workers and the hours
required increased, so that was a very tangible benefit.
Care workers told us they thought it had improved safety for
both clients and workers. ■
Designed to enhance
the well-being of aged
users by allowing greater
access to the use and
consumption of water
Simple, ergonomic intuit