Project Lead:
Professor Tony Arthur, Professor of Nursing Science, University of East Anglia
About the Project
We set out to design a training course for HCAs to improve the relational care of older people in acute hospitals. We produced Older People’s Shoes, an innovative and interactive training programme designed to get HCAs to consider ways to get to know older people and understand the challenges that older patients face. A ‘train-the-trainer’ model was used to allow the intervention to be viable beyond the testing sites.
What we did
To understand what training is currently given to HCAs, we conducted a telephone survey of acute NHS hospitals in England. To establish what older people, HCAs and other staff who work with HCAs believe should be included in HCA training, we undertook group interviews with older people and individual interviews with HCAs and other staff. To see whether or not we could formally test this new training for HCAs, we conducted a pilot cluster-randomised trial in 12 wards from three acute hospitals.
What we found
We found existing training to be highly variable, and focused on new rather than existing staff, with relational care not given a high priority. From the trial we concluded that a larger study to examine whether we could observe changes in patient outcomes would be challenging but possible. Older People’s Shoes was well received by participants. This was particularly the case for the health care assistants whose training needs are often overlooked or restricted to mandatory requirements where the focus is almost exclusively on safety.
