Dollars to develop the workforce

The federal government has funded 26 organisations to develop new workforce models to improve the provision of community and residential aged care, and move away from the rigid top-down leadership that is traditional in nursing.

Above: Minister for Ageing, Mark Butler, with a resident of Helping Hand Aged Care facility at Mawson Lakes, Adelaide.

By Stephen Easton

Late last week the Minister for Ageing, Mark Butler, announced $10.2 million to fund 26 aged care workforce development projects to ‘redesign’ the way staff work in community and residential aged care.

The funding is split into four streams, three of which are about building workforce capacity of community aged care providers, to improve medication management, complex care coordination and the prevention of functional decline.

Another stream, for “building workforce capacity and capability in residential aged care”, is funding 10 residential aged care providers to improve the “capacity and capability” of their workforce.

In some cases at least, this will invovle departing from the top-down leadership model traditionally used in nursing and enabling all staff members – including non-care staff and allied health professionals – to share the responsibility for delivering care, and rely more on their own initative.

Mr Butler made the announcement at an aged care facility at Mawson Lakes in Adelaide operated by Helping Hand Aged Care, which was one of 10 providers who received a $400,000 grant in the residential stream.

Helping Hand’s director of research and development, Megan Corlis, said the South Australian provider’s project was about moving away from the rigid, top-down leadership structure that was the traditional model in aged care facilities.

Instead, she said, the new model was about finding ways to distribute leadership across the workforce and allow staff members to rely more on their own initiative.

“What Helping Hand is going to do is really to look at the workforce structures and how we can improve those structures, to improve the delivery of care and the quality of care,” Ms Corlis said. 

“Helping hand’s particular project is about building a leadership and teamwork model within that workforce. It is about how we can build good quality teamwork models, because there’s so few people delivering the care.”

She said the project was not about increasing the skills of care staff like enrolled nurses or assistants-in-nursing (AINs), but creating a new workforce model for staff to “come together as a team and discuss residents”.

“It increases the opportunities for them to get together, to talk about people and to better inform each other about what’s going on,” Ms Corlis said.

Queensland aged care provider Caritas Care is also among the organisations that received $400,000 from the federal government for workforce development, which it will use to fund a project called ‘Follow my journey’.

Project manager Julie Cheney said the organisation would look at the “whole spectrum of workers who care, or influence care, for residents”, including staff from two nearby hospitals, St Vincents Brisbane and Holy Spirit Northside.

Partnering with the two Brisbane hospitals, according to Ms Cheney, is a big part of the project, “so they can be part of determining how to improve the resident’s journey, and improve and up skill RNs as well as ENs and AINs, to work to the top of their scope”.

“This is a whole of workforce approach,” Ms Cheney said. 

“For example, a cleaner in residential aged care isn’t like a cleaner in an office block; they see the residents every day, and they might have a chat to them. Everyone in a residential care facility has a role, and this is about more interaction between different staff members.

“How we’re trying to conceptualise it is: how can we allow a cleaner or a kitchen worker to perhaps notice something different and communicate that back to the decision-makers? – in this case, the nurses.”

She said the project involved implementing a communication system to allow any  worker to support clinical care staff by providing them with relevant information about residents, creating a more client-centred workplace.

“It’s to make sure those interactions and relationships that are part of working in a residential aged care facility are focused on the residents, because our residents’ health is changing far more dramatically than it was ten years ago, and we need to be more alert to those changes,” she said.

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