Executive+Summary+004

//“Personal care workers are relatively lowly paid and generally work on a part time or casual basis. In the community personal carers work in relative isolation and face additional health and safety challenges as their workplace is an individual’s home. The impact of low-pay, part-time casual employment and the isolation of their work make it difficult to attract, train and retain workers.”//

National College Australia (NCA) and KinCare are developing a training model designed to address training constraints facing the home and community care workforce. This project will demonstrate how Traineeship funding can be efficiently applied to provide a Certificate III Home and Community Care training program integrated with KinCare’s general field staff professional development program.

Home-based care programs are highly valued by the community and have been growing in popularity and proportion of overall community service funding – particularly in the aged care sector. This project will overcome a number of constraints to enable training standards in this critically important and growing sector to keep pace with those occurring in more highly supervised residential care environments.

This program will be designed to benefit the whole of the KinCare home care workforce whether or not they are in a formal traineeship program. Innovative e-learning tools will be applied to enable trainees to undertake further learning and undertake self learning checks and formal assessments between scheduled workshops using virtual scenario based learning on a Learning Management platform. Both instructor lead and self directed learner networks will also be developed using electronic communication technologies in order to build community and enable information sharing between workers who generally work in isolation. The profile of the traineeship program will also be elevated using various promotional, induction, orientation, and graduation programs in order to attract potential trainees and generate enthusiasm for ongoing engagement and higher completion rates.