workforce
commission stories of abuse came to
light. Did that change your approach or
any of your work?
I think it just changed the urgency with
which we need to get this work out there.
Before even the Four Corners program, we
were piloting the competency framework.
Some of the main outcomes from that
were that the competency framework
is enabling practitioners to develop
a confidence in their care and also a
competence to deliver good quality care
that they hadn’t had to previously.
We set up mentor and mentee
relationships. One of the specific questions
we asked at the end of the pilot was, do
the mentors or mentees think they could
have achieved what the practitioners
achieved using the framework without the
documentation that we provided them
with? We wondered if it was just those
relationships that we set up that had been
the element that had helped practitioners
develop their confidence and competence.
There was a clear endorsement of
the whole framework. The mentors and
mentees said they couldn’t have got
where they did without the documentation
and the specific guidance we provided.
How many facilities have currently
taken up the framework?
It’s five organisations. Each organisation
recruited, say, two to three nursing homes
and community service teams to trial
the documentation.
Is the learning provided free to nurses
and aged care professionals?
The members of the collaborative
supported this project. What we’ll be doing
is looking in the future to see how we can
work with other aged care organisations to
integrate the work we’ve done with their
existing learning and development and their
quality programs. Any organisation can
contact us and we can talk them through
how they can use the resources.
Is that the next step – trying to get it
more widely rolled out?
Actually, we’ve got one final phase. The first
phase was developing an evidence-based
framework with various research activities
that were completed. We piloted the
documentation that we created to provide
guidance on how to use the framework.
Our next stage that we’re doing, in the
second half of this year, is developing a
leadership module that will be shared
across aged care organisations that employ
new graduates and early career registered
nurses, those nurses who’ve been in aged
Using this framework
will contribute to the
delivery of high quality,
person-centred care.
care for five years or less. We’re going to
develop a leadership module that sets
those colleagues up to understand what
the responsibilities of working in aged
care are. Then they’ll use the portfolio
to demonstrate their competence as
gerontological nurse specialists. ■
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