workforce
Positive change
An innovative program based on‘ action learning’ is helping care homes improve residents’ quality of life.
Wendy Penney interviewed by Dallas Bastian
Rather than pursuing traditional education methods, three nursing homes in rural Victoria have taken part in workshops that focus on valuing the knowledge of participants, facilitating them to share their reflections with each other, as part of a study into action learning in aged care.
The project, funded by a Commonwealth government rural education grant, was based on My Home Life, a UK program that aims to promote quality of life and deliver positive change in care homes.
Having explored how action learning enhanced care in homes in the UK, study lead Wendy Penney, who conducted the research while at Federation University Australia, has been developing this approach in aged care as an alternative to managing change.
Aged Care Insite sits down with Penney to find out more about action learning and whether it should be rolled out across more Australian aged-care facilities.
ACI: Tell us a little bit about action learning and what it involves. WP: It’ s a different approach to traditional methods of education. The key concept is creating a safe and reflective space within a group for learning to occur. A very strong relationship is developed between the participants and the facilitator, and each person in the group’ s knowledge and contribution is valued.
Learning occurs through reflection and action rather than the facilitators acting as teachers telling people what to do. This suits, particularly, aged-care settings or health settings where you do have a lot of people who are experts in their own field, and who as a group can come together, share their understandings, and take action.
How did your workshops run? We had three workshops in each of the nursing homes – three workshops, four hours in duration and two weeks apart. It really was only a beginning taster of action learning.
Action learning, the UK model, is a leadership program that runs for 12 months. We started out with the question:“ What do you do well here in terms of providing good quality of life for residents?”
Then we moved on to:“ What would you like to do differently and what would you like to improve?”
So the process is unconditional positive questioning. It has that appreciative inquiry, very strong appreciative inquiry framework, where you are appreciating what is done well rather than what often happens in nursing homes, where it’ s constant criticism. You value and start with what works well.
In moving on to the areas that staff or participants identified that they would like to improve, that then becomes the activities that individuals and the group work on through positive questioning, working with each other, identifying what it is that they’ re going to do to make that improvement. They then take that improvement away, implement it into their daily practice, come back a fortnight later, and spend some more time reflecting on that activity – what went well and what then needs refining.
Participants are working on real-life issues in a very positive and practical way and using each other as support.
How did staff react to the different elements of the program? We ran an icebreaker at the beginning of each of the workshops
30 agedcareinsite. com. au