Aged Care Insite Issue 120 Aug-Sep 2020 | Page 24

practical living From little things New staff training aims to bridge the language barrier, foster stronger relationships between residents and carers. By Conor Burke A new training kit has been developed to help foster stronger relationships between carers and aged care recipients. The creation of The Little Things training kit was led by the Farnham Street Neighbourhood Learning Centre in partnership with Meaningful Ageing Australia and contains evidence-based intercultural language training materials for personal care assistants from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds working, or training to work, in aged care. It is all about increasing the confidence of students and helping them engage with older Australians in a meaningful way in their future careers. Approximately 6.9 million Australians were born overseas and 23.2 per cent of homes speak another language as well as English, and it is estimated that 32 per cent of RACF workers were born overseas, so finding a way to communicate in a diverse society is key for care workers. The idea was formed by Pip Mackey, project coordinator of The Little Things training, as she taught English while 22 agedcareinsite.com.au studying for her master’s in applied linguistics. Mackey taught an Ethiopian student who often struggled with grammatical English and worked in aged care while she studied. “I became interested in that, thinking of the complexity of the work of a personal care assistant, which we call PCAs. With that complex work, with this sort of low, strictly low level of English, how was she managing to bridge that divide?” said Mackey. “I was also studying this use of pragmatic language, which is the rules and tools of how we make meaning between ourselves and the other person, and how we understand or misunderstand each other. So, she was my sort of ‘person zero’ on that, and I did some study activities with her and looked at how she had all these pragmatic language skills, even though maybe her verbs didn’t agree with their pronouns, and was clearly very effective in the way she connected with an older person.” This initial idea led Mackey to seek and receive funding through the Workforce Training Innovation Fund, the Department of Education and Training in Victoria. Mackey spoke with Aged Care Insite to discuss the project and how it can improve the lives of aged care recipients. ACI: What does the training include? PM: The key tools are six films. The Little Things project involved going and making recordings of personal carers working with older people. So, the participating PCAs, who were nominated as displaying best practice by older people living in aged care homes or by senior staff, were interviewed as were the senior staff and trainers in our RTOs to find out what they saw as the most important things that people needed to know and learn. Best practice PCAs wore little audio recording devices and made recordings with older people who volunteered to be part of it over a course of three days. We used those recordings, after coding and analysing them, to form the backbone of six films. So, everything relies on authentic language use and the practise that we observed in the aged care homes, as well as what occurred in the recordings. They’re not scripted as such as using chunks of authentic language. It includes a lot of what we call ‘little words’ that are really quite important and often overlooked and rarely something that you teach a person, but they are discourse markers. So, they’re the words like the ‘so’ or the ‘okay’ and the ‘aha.’ A lot of those little sounds are interspersed through our language and they perform really important functions in the way we communicate. So, the films highlight those as well as highlighting other language strategies people use, such as how they might connect with an older person as they go along.