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May 30, 2017

Study outlines skills needed for aged care nursing

Rapidly ageing population placing new demands on workforce

As the number of older people in Australia grows rapidly in coming years, one of the many challenges will be to develop a skilled aged-care workforce able to care for them and help them achieve a good quality of life.

The recent Productivity Commission report on aged care services found that while the number of support staff in aged care had increased rapidly over the past five years, the number of registered nurses remained static. At the same time, the health problems that older people now face, both in the community and in nursing homes, are greater than in the past.

Consequently, the role of registered nurses is more crucial than ever in ensuring the quality of care needed is delivered effectively.

To help the aged care sector better understand the skills and knowledge registered nurses will need, academics from the ÃÃÍÅÊÓƵ joined not-for-profit aged care providers to develop a competency framework.

from ÃÃÍÅÊÓƵ’s School of Nursing said there isn't currently a framework or approach that could be considered standard across states in Australia, or even locally between different nursing homes.

“We were invited to join a group of not-for-profit aged-care providers who've set up the Nursing in Aged Care Collaborative (NACC) who are all passionate about delivering the best registered nursing care they can,” Professor Traynor said.

“Developing a competency framework is one way to address all the issues these providers grapple with: recruiting staff, retaining them, deciding what education is deliver to the staff, and what specialist services are offered older people in nursing homes and the community.

“A competency framework says if you’re working in aged care as a registered nurse you should be competent in these areas. It would give the public reassurance that the aged-care industry is going to deliver services of a similar high standard.

“The idea came from the NACC. The providers were saying, ‘We're all doing something slightly different. We think we're doing the right thing –but everything's different so let's come together and develop a common vision.”

The resulting study, “Developing Gerontological Nursing Competencies: An e-Delphi Study”, drew widely on the experience of senior registered nurses currently working in aged care, both in nursing home and community care settings.

After reviewing the literature to find what competency frameworks and quality standards already existed, a workshop was held and 80 senior registered nurses who reviewed a comprehensive list of competencies. This resulted in a draft list of gerontological nursing competencies which a larger group of 409 registered nurses gave feedback on through five rounds of online consultation.

“We used a rigorous research approach and developed a competency framework that's been wholly endorsed by experts, mainly from Australia but also an international cohort of experts. These are experts who mainly work in clinical practice, but also some academics and researchers in the field,” Professor Traynor said.

“We reached a 95 per cent agreement on the content of the competency framework.

“The participants thought it should have two levels of practice: an essential level of practice for most registered nurses working in aged care; and an enhanced level of practice for those who are expert in the specialism.”

The next stage of the research involves pilot testing the competency framework in clinical practice with registered nurses and their managers. Additional aged care providers are welcome to join to this pilot. Later in the year, the competency framework will be made freely available on the Aged and Dementia Health Education and Research (ADHERe) .

The competency framework could be used in a number of ways, Professor Traynor said, from recruitment of registered nurses, to in-house training, to career development, to designing university courses for nurses so they are ready to step into the sector when they graduate.

Partners: Anglicare, BaptistCare, HammondCare, Scalabrini, Uniting