Workforce must be included in tech transition, say researchers
A research project between NARI and Silverchain on digital literacy in home care found a high rate of workers already regularly use technology, and researchers reiterate the importance of including the workforce when mapping technological changes.
Speaking on day two of the ITAC 2025 conference Silverchain research discovery director Adjunct Professor Tanya Davison and National Ageing Research Institute clinical gerontology director Associate Professor Frances Batchelor presented their evidence-based framework for digital transformation in aged care.
Following the presentation Dr Davison told Australian Ageing Agenda that all research and innovation activities involving digital technologies at Silverchain now used the framework as standard practice during the planning phase.
“We are also embedding this into the standard procedures for activities led by other teams at Silverchain,” she said to AAA.
NARI is a not-for-profit medical research institute dedicated to ageing and aged care translational research and Silverchain is a not-for-profit home and community care organisation that provides complete health and aged care services to over 140,000 clients a year.
Surveying 359 aged care clients across Western Australia and Victoria in a collaborative research project between NARI and Silverchain, Dr Davison told the ITAC 2025 conference on Thursday they asked about their readiness to use technology, how and what kind of technology they are currently, and how they feel about using technology for health and aged care services.
She said they found they have a group of people with high access to technology but that only one in three of technology users were using it to access health care services.
“I think there’s an opportunity here for us to make ready use of the devices that people have, but we also asked people who were not current users of technology, why not? You know, what were the impediments for them? And we heard the usual things that we were expecting, like it’s too complicated, it’s too difficult to use, but the most common reason we heard from our clients was they didn’t see the use of it,” Dr Davison told delegates.
“They didn’t see how these technologies were going to improve their lives. So I think we do need to really make sure that we’re tailoring technologies to people’s actual needs.
“I think we often take technology that’s been used elsewhere and we assume it’s going to be good for our clients, but we need to start with our clients and what they need and what they think are important.”
They also surveyed 267 frontline staff in different roles across Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria to look at whether it was a digital health literate workforce.
“We looked at how they were currently using technology outside of work and we looked at their attitudes towards technology,” Dr Davison said.
“We brought all of that together and what we found from this group was overall most people had a reasonable level of digital readiness. They were using technology themselves. They felt relatively positively about using technology in their work. But there was a small group in this sample – it was 12 per cent of people – who had very low levels of readiness.
“So this is a group we’re going to need to really be mindful of. We’re going to need to identify these people and look at how we can support them as we’re implementing technologies.
“But encouragingly, we found that just over a quarter of our sample had high levels of digital literacy. We’ve got people within our workforces who are ready to get going with trying new things and these might be the early adopters.”
The early adopters tended to be people who were younger, university educated and in clinical roles Dr Davison said.
Of course there are other barriers, she acknowledged, but said it is encouraging the rates of technology use are already high.
Developing the framework
The framework for enabling technology-supported home care had to recognise that technology in home-based care is a different eco-system to residential aged care or hospitals, said Dr Batchelor.
This, along with the frontline workforce, means technology implementation in the home care setting had to be practical.
With funding from Aged Care Research and Industry Innovation Australia, NARI and Silverchain conducted several studies to generate evidence – with particular focus on the barriers and enablers to successful implementation of technology, Dr Batchelor explained.
They also used the information from the client and workforce surveys with in-depth interviews with staff from Silverchain and held a co-design workshop with staff, consumer advisors and other partners.
A literature review was also done, with 40 papers found detailing the enablers and barriers to technology implementation.
One thing that was very much highlighted in the workforce survey was the need for reliable technology, said Dr Batchelor.
“There’s no surprise if you don’t have good connectivity and you’re needing to do something with your phone like accessing data and that’s not possible then whatever is implemented will fail,” she said.
“We need strong organisational and managerial support, and we need staff to have access to either someone to go to to fix a problem – but that has to be immediate and timely.
“And again, potentially linking in with this idea of the super users, all those people who are early adopters need to support the people who have less confidence in using technology.”
In terms of the in-depth interviews, Dr Batchelor said results were very much aligned with the workforce survey results, with many of the staff believing technology has a place, and that it can be used to streamline processes and improve care. Concern was raised about technology replacing face-to-face contact however.
“They want to use technology to improve what they can provide for the clients and they want to make sure that the training is well designed and well implemented within the organisation,” said Dr Batchelor.
“It’s not enough to implement technology and involve the staff at a later point in time,” she said.
Dr Batchelor also reiterated that the framework was designed to be very practical, and they synthesised all the evidence into seven major themes:
- technology design factors and features
- privacy, security and trust
- training and technical support
- organisational design and culture
- aspects of client care
- digital literacy
- perceived benefits of technology
The complete framework can be found here.
They also came up with an implementation checklist to accompany the framework, which asks people to consider the gap they are trying to address, the need or the opportunity, and to consider whether technology is the best solution.
The implementation checklist can be found here.
“Whenever we’re both piloting and then implementing at a broader scale any piece of digital technology we’ll pull out this checklist,” said Dr Davison.
“We’ve had fantastic feedback from a whole variety of different teams that are involved in technology implementation. We’re very happy to make this available to everyone. I hope it will be useful for other home care providers,” she said.
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