practical skills

Sorry I seem to be using up so much of this blog space recently, but I have so much that I want to share and to learn about from you all!! sometimes I get a bit over-excited.

I was wondering how you go about giving the students workplace experience?

In our CIII, they have lots of chances to practice skills in the simulated work environment at the campus. Wendy is going to upload some photos of this, but I have been making her work too hard and she hasn't had time yet this week!  This goes right through their time with us. They have a number of assessments undertaken in this simulated environment, which I will leave Wendy to tell you about, as she is the expert in them.

Then the staff take them on visits to local facilities and services so they get a feeling for how things are done.

And often they are then sent in small groups (each group with a teacher) to local aged care facilities to spend 4 hours paired up with a staff member - we call this the "buddy shift". It gives them a chance to put their skills into practice for a short time, so it is not too overwhelming for them.

We used to do something similar, where we would arrange with a local facility that they wouldn't make tehir beds that day, and a teacher or two would take the students to the facility and make all the beds - which was a nice simple introduction to the work environment, and a nice gift to give the busy staff of the facilities which are so kind as to allow our students to join them! Or similarly, they might have gone for a couple of hours and assisted people who had trouble eating. but now we tend to use the "buddy shift" system.

Just after mid-way through their course, the students do about 4 days of work in an aged care facility. this "placement" is in "high care", where people are very very frail. And right near the end of their course, the students go to another 4 full days of placement, which is in "low care" ie where the people are a little more independant - this is sometimes called "hostel care". But we know that as time goes on, there are very few people in low care who really are in need of low care - they increasingly need higher levels of care. Is that so in sweden too?

The time spent in the workplace is wonderful for the students, and many of them get work as a result of it. All up they are probably in the workplace for 80-90 hours in their course, in addition to the simulated setting.

At CIV level, where people already have some aged care experience, the students have to do 120 hours. At our campus, we stipulate that this has to include time in high care, low care, community-based care and dementia care. They can often do much of it in their own workplace, which means they don't have to take time off work to do it.

One of the good things about all these placements is that teachers are in contact with the students every day, often actualy visiting them and doing some of tehir assessments in the workplace, and getting feedback from the workplace about how the student is performing. It makes our links with the local professional field very strong.

Overall, our local aged care providers allow our students to do over 8,000 hours of placement with them, which we are very grateful for.

I'm looking forward to hearing how you do this.