Aged Care Insite Issue 120 Aug-Sep 2020 | Page 25

practical living How they might do things like use their voice. They might refer to a shared history. They might say, ‘We did that yesterday. Let’s do that together,’ and it’ll incorporate that sort of small talk in the chat. There might be a bit of fun. We found a lot of the PCAs that we met talked about how some of them like to sing, and join in singing a song with an older person. The films describe six different situations that commonly occur. One of them is setting the dining room and some of the politics around serving of lunch and people sharing tables, attitudes to food, to alcohol. There’s a shower scene. There’s a situation where an older person is reluctant to engage in an activity, and the PCA is aware that she needs to encourage that person to come out of her room for her mental health needs. Lots of these issues that get commonly described, they’re our backbone. We have a trainer’s manual that describes how the training can be delivered, and it really focuses on it being very flexible training. We know that if a trainer wants to use this in an RTO, that trainer is going to have a lot more opportunities to spend more time and expand and engage their students, and those students will benefit from communicative activities. All of this work eventually led to a pilot program. Can you tell us a bit about the places where you ran the program and some of the things that you’ve seen arise? We worked with four aged care organisations and three RTOs as partners, and they fed into the project the whole time and that’s where we conducted our research. When it came to the pilot project, we delivered the training at three RTOs to groups of students who were studying certificate three in individual support, and we also delivered it to groups of personal carers who were in the workplace at the aged care homes: Ourcare, Uniting AgeWell, Outlook Gardens; and the three RTOs were Levitan Community Education, The Centre in Wangaratta and the Westgate Community Initiatives Group. We went and trialled the materials. We actually ran a first pilot program where we had three-hour training sessions. We surveyed the students or the PCAs pre and post training and looked for what effects the training had. We had really good results from that, and we also used that as our main idea to help us improve the materials for the next round of trials, which we ran January through to March this year, and of course, COVID-19 hit as we were just finishing off. Professor Yvonne Wells from La Trobe Uni conducted the evaluation. She used the pre and post surveys and she also ran a most significant change evaluation process. She interviewed 23 of the trainees, about two- or three-weeks post-training, to ask them what the most significant change was that they experienced from the training. We also ran an online survey three or four weeks after and had pretty good responses from that too. What kind of feedback were you getting from students and the recipients of care? We weren’t surveying the recipients of care. We were surveying the PCAs and the RTO students, and the feedback we were getting was very much that this kind of training helped them relate better to people, think about relating to people, and relating as they went along. Some of them said things like, ‘This training should be given to all carers.’ ‘The older person is going to feel safe, comfortable, and trustful to you.’ ‘It showed me how to connect with others in specific situations in day to day care.’ ‘I realised that this will improve the relationship between me and residents.’ And this one came up quite often and in discussion as well: ‘It made my job easier and now I can relate to my clients even more.’ So, it was self-perceived improvements, but the perceived impression of how their communication skills improved was 80 or 90 per cent. So, it was probably a lot about confidence? Yeah, confidence came up as a theme. The most significant change was the quality of evaluation process, and that was one of the key themes; that confidence had improved remarkably from this three hour session, and that they could see that they could apply it, that it was relevant, and they very much looked at how it could improve the quality of care that they could offer. Was there any anecdotal evidence from the homes and recipients of care? I know there was no official survey, but was there any feedback, or just things that you noticed from the recipients? There was a beautiful quote, someone saying of when, after they did the training and they were talking to an older man and he said stuff like, ‘What’s happened to you? You’re talking so differently.’ So, clearly they did notice, and it came up that they were just noticing they were a bit more efficient and coming up against less resistance from an older person. About the name, The Little Things. It sounds like it is all about those little niceties, those little bits of relationships that can be built through the small act of language and communication. Yeah. I’d definitely agree. They are massive. So, there’s a couple of answers to that. One, it’s not just the niceties. They are really important ways of how you modify your practical type of language. A PCA’s job is extremely practical, but also extremely relational at the same time. So, how they modify their language during some very tricky, practical tasks and very intimate and very invasive ones to make that person feel, as one of our trainees said, ‘comfortable and trustful to you’. Those are their words. That is really important, and you can do it with language in conjunction with body language and facial expressions. They are the things that don’t necessarily transfer across a culture, but we don’t often have a discussion about how those cultural differences can apply and then just feel somebody is being rude because in their culture, your tone of voice goes down when you would like the tone of voice to go up. Those very subtle differences make a massive difference. So, those are really little things that have a very big impact, and the other thing was just about everybody we interviewed to ask what those differences were in communication, they often said, ‘Oh, it’s just the little things. You know?’ It’s just saying hello before you take a nightie off or the little ‘Thank you’s,’ or the ‘How are you?’ Or the taking an interest in a picture that’s on a wall. Those very little things make a big difference, and yeah, we almost heard it with every single person. They said how important those little things were, because we know we can’t ask a PCA to add another big thing to their daily care routines, but they can incorporate these little things to the work that they’re already running around doing. ■ agedcareinsite.com.au 23