Living Learning Caring........ a Trinity to Build On

Presentation to the 12th Annual Educational ConferenceCanadian Association of

Continuing Care Educators

ContextVarious titles:

•Personal Care Worker, •Personal Support Worker, •Personal Attendant •or in some cases Homemakers.

Carry out most (70–80%) of all paid home care work in the country

Workforce is estimated at over 180,000 people working as PSWs or in similar roles

In Canada, these workers are women, predominantly (96%) of the workforce

Broadly, PSWs reflect the ethnic and racial diversity of Canada

Visible minorities are over-represented among PSWs, making up 42% of this labour force

PSWs work in a wide range of settings

Role of PSWs in Providing Care

• Approximately three-quarters of direct care staff in Ontario’s LTC sector are Personal Support Workers (PSWs) (MOHLTC, 2012).

• Expansion of tasks performed by PSWs, incl. delegated tasks such as catheterization and injection (home/community) (Berta et al 2013)

• Despite their importance, relatively little is known about them.

• They are also an older labour force (Lum 2013) so questions of longevity come into play

Living

Work-life balance is basically the positive relationship between work and other equally important activities in life which include family leisure.

Demanding Labour

The aging of the health care labour force, combined with the

changing population in health services may explain some of

the high rates of work absences due to illness and injury.

This may be the case especially in long-term residential care

where the largest proportion of workers is in the oldest age

groups and where health care workers do some of the most

physically demanding labour. However, our international

comparative data on personal support workers (PSWs)

suggest a more complex explanation..

Pat Armstrong, PHD, FRSC, York University

Demanding Labour

Rates of physical violence are very high for Canadian PSWs. Canadians compared to Scandinavians are also twice as likely to experience physical exhaustion on a daily basis, four times as likely to experience mental exhaustion and three times as likely to almost always experience back pain Workload and staffing levels are factors Canadians are almost three times as likely as their Scandinavian counterparts to report that they work short-staffed on a daily basis

A Comprehensive Strategy on Workplace Health Promotion is needed!

.............Especially for this workforce.

A tremendous need to design wellness programs that take into account workforce demographics, job characteristics and health status.

Learning

Beyond the ProgramLifelong learning can enhance our understanding of the world

around us, provide us with more and better opportunities and

improve our quality of life.

•Boosts our confidence and self-esteem

•Helps us achieve a more satisfying personal life

•Makes us less risk averse and more adaptable to change

when it happens

•Challenges our ideas and beliefs

Caring

Caring

Nel Noddings – “when we engage in caring encounters perhaps the first thing we discover about ourselves is that we are receptive; we are attentive in a special way’.Receptive attention is an essential characteristic of a caring encounter. The carer is open to what the cared-for is saying and might be experiencing and is able to reflect upon it.Caring involves connection between the carer and the cared-for and a degree of reciprocity; that is to say that both gain from the encounter in different ways and both give.

The key, central to care theory, is this: caring-about

(or, perhaps a sense of justice) must be seen as

instrumental in establishing the conditions under

which caring-for can flourish. Although the preferred

form of caring is cared-for, caring-about can help in

establishing, maintaining, and enhancing it. Those

who care about others in the justice sense must keep

in mind that the objective is to ensure that caring

actually occurs. Caring-about is empty if it does not

culminate in caring relations. (Noddings 2002: 23-4)

https://vimeo.com/53438675

The Future has several names. 

For the weak, it is Impossible. 

For the fainthearted, it is

Unknown.  For the thoughtful

and valiant, it is IDEAL.

Victor Hugo