Queen Victoria Care in partnership with the University of Tasmania has been awarded an ARIIA grant for their ‘Improving dementia care in residential settings: A project to build skills, confidence and capacity of aged care staff’ project.
This translational program supports the development of aged care staff to embrace and apply evidence-based dementia care practices in their organisation. A co-designed education program will assist aged care staff to build knowledge of evidence-based dementia care, and enable them to develop skills, confidence and capacity to drive transformational change in their workplace.
A three-phase model will be implemented and evaluated.
1. Review and preparation of the workplace. Initial scoping of workplace challenges and enablers, strengths and weaknesses, with the identification of learning priorities and the cocreation of a site- specific education workbook. Existing evidence-based learning resources will be tailored to suit the workplace needs and assets.
2. Delivery of education program. Experienced dementia educators will use the co-designed site-specific workbooks, completed by staff, as the basis for four on-site experiential, applied learning workshops.
3. Consolidation. Workshops with whole of team debrief and action plans for sustainability. A co-design plan to embed ongoing education and best practice dementia care will be developed. The leadership team will support a sustainable ongoing approach.
Evaluation will be undertaken through a structured research program utilising mixed methods. The project findings will allow the project to be successfully applied in other aged care settings.