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. ■
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