Are you looking to upskill?
The Australian Centre for Evidence Based Aged Care (ACEBAC) at La Trobe University has released a series of free, open-access learning modules which cater to three key areas highlighted by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety:
• Dementia Care
• Recognising and providing a palliative response to care
• Oral hygiene and links to health and well-being
Anne-Marie Mahoney, project lead of the Victorian Aged Care Education and Training Modules (VACET), tells Aged Care News that whilst the Victorian Government-funded programme caters to Victorian specific legislation around palliative care, it can be a valuable resource for aged care workers and nurses across the country.
“Because it’s open access, if you’ve got the URL, you can access it,” she says.
“We’ve got users from pretty much every jurisdiction in Australia, and we’ve also got some overseas users: quite a couple from Canada and the UK.”
Mahoney says the learning materials were developed with subject matter experts and the best available evidence.
“We worked with Dementia Training Australia, the Centre for Palliative Care in Victoria, and the La Trobe dental and oral hygiene school.”
“What we are really aware of is how busy people are, and 70 per cent of people who work in residential aged care or personal care workers, so they have varying levels of educational preparation.
“There’s a lot of stuff out there … so we did all the kind of sourcing of material, digesting it into an easy-to-use format”
The VACET was designed to be more engaging than your standard textbook, incorporating a variety of text, video content and interactive activities.
“One of the things we didn’t want to do was just kind of text, you know: read, read read,” Mahoney says.
“So there’s some video, there’s some activities where you ping things around, and so it’s a bit more interactive than your current text based learning.”
The modules can be completed in any order and users can choose to complete the whole set of modules or cater their learning to their own personal knowledge gaps.
“You don’t have to do the whole lot, and you don’t have to do it in any order.
“You can kind of move around and create your own journey,” Mahoney says.
“The other thing that that’s proving really popular is users can actually generate a report of their learning, so they can use that as evidence for continuous professional development or if they’re applying for a new role they can use them as evidence.”
For registered nurses and allied health professionals, these modules can be credited towards your annual CPD requirements.
To register for the course or to find out more, visit the VACET website.
