Cutting-edge training planned for 900 health-care workers

We recently reported on the difficulties aged care faces in Australia, with the Community Services and Health Industry Skills Council changing the minimum work placement requirements around both Certificate III and Certificate IV training.

This is part of a wider plan to handle a population that continues to age and increase in size. According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data, the Australian population grows by one birth every one minute and 44 seconds. With a death occurring every three minutes and 27 seconds, it is close to a 2:1 birth/death ratio.

Health care is one of the first to feel the strain of an understaffed and underdeveloped workforce, and palliative care is expected to be overburdened in the near future. To balance a high demand for care in this area, 900 rural and regional health, aged and community care workers will receive training nationwide through a new selection of RTO programs.

Reported this month by Australian Ageing Agenda (AAA), these health-care professionals are in line to receive cutting-edge training, developed in support of the psychological needs of people in their care, as well as families and the caregivers themselves.

The program will focus on terminally ill patients, after being developed and delivered by RTO and aged-care provider integratedliving Australia. The organisation recently received $3.3 million in Commonwealth funding for the development of its three-part program titled Listen, Acknowledge, Respond.

Using $1.8 million of this, integratedliving Australia will create a series of five workshops and roll these out to around 900 health-care professionals in every state. To do this, they'll rely on a network of qualified people in health care training jobs until the program concludes in June 2017.

The RTO's manager Dianne Potter said the program will take a fresh look at palliative care.

"There is already a lot of work around palliative care, and we recognise that, but this program is a totally new way of looking at it," she explained to AAA. "The training is … for those people at a higher level that we need to target to ensure that they recognise this is a new way of dealing with it so they will refer people."

"The research will be looking at the social benefits to the patient but also the actual benefit to carers and care givers and also the families of the carers.

As part of the program, instructional design writers will be hired to develop the new learning materials for Certificate IV qualifications, which will also be used in a graduate certificate program at Charles Sturt University in New South Wales.

Once the material is developed, it has the potential to reach wider audiences as it's digitalised and published online, further helping to prepare for the hurdles that lie further down the track in Australian health care.

Edutemps, a recruitment agency for the training sector is playing its part by providing trainers to implement Aged Care programs currently being run in NSW.