Aged Care Management Training and Workforce Development

Management Training and Coaching

AgeWorks provides aged care management training and coaching to enable CEOs and managers to:

  • Implement the new aged care quality standards
  • Lead teams during times of organisational change
  • Rectify aged care non-compliance
  • Continually improve clinical governance
  • Change behaviours relating to chemical restraints in aged care
Aged Care Management Training and Workforce Development for new aged care quality standards and clinical governance

AgeWorks runs a range or training programs to complement your existing training or tailored to your specific needs. In the first instance we help you do a simple training needs analysis so you can prioritise and plan your training. This helps to engage your team in their own learning and development.

Coaching and Mentoring

Our coaching and mentoring programs are geared to helping people make a permanent shift in their workplace behaviour. Coaching involves coming alongside someone, supporting them to achieve specific goals, increasing skills and self-awareness.

We are great at developing rapport and helping folk to identify their blocks. When we’re on a project, we coach all team members as a normal part of our process (eg. administrative, lifestyle, clinical). We help people to reframe problems and empower them to move forward.

Mentoring may be defined as guidance and coaching provided by someone who’s been there, has a greater level of mastery and can impart their knowledge. Our mentoring is geared to managers and organisational leaders. We have experienced executives, managers and clinical managers who understand the demands of those roles and can provide specific expertise.

Why choose AgeWorks for Training and Development?

We understand that in the aged care world training needs to be very practical and pitched in the right way. Our training is results focused. 

We help individuals develop the flexibility to do things differently. We zoom in on the essentials, preparing folk with the specific knowledge, skills and attitude they need right now.

Our founder’s (Kay Horgan) passion is staff development with a focus on life-long learning and self-improvement. With a master’s degree in education, her thesis was in change and staff development. She ran a state-wide training and consultancy service for government for several years.

As the inaugural Staff Development Coordinator at Bundoora Extended Care in the early 90’s, her training has always been innovative e.g. she co-developed and pioneered the experiential learning program known as “Understanding Dementia’ (a federally funded dementia demonstration project evaluated by Monash University, later adopted by Alzheimer’s Australia, which helped shape the virtual dementia program run by Dementia Services Australia today).   

Our Industry Trainers

AgeWorks industry trainers are qualified with Certificate IV Workplace Training and Assessment as well as their specific areas of subject matter expertise.

Our key consultants invest heavily in their own development. They have been coached and mentored by some of the world’s best teachers and are keen to pass this expertise on to the next generation.

Aged Care Team Building and Resilience

Working in a highly regulated environment and a competitive market takes its toll on aged care managers and their teams. Organisations often find it hard to generate sustainable revenue while managing compliance risks. Challenges can be created by legislative and policy change, consumer choice, a mixture of part-time and full-time employees working across shifts, organisational silos and poor communication.

In this environment, it’s easy for people to become stuck and get in their own way. Teams can unravel, individuals may become fearful and resistant to change. We help people and teams get back into their flow. We’re trained and certified coaches and performance coaches. We have tools such as personality profiling with very easy to read feedback reports for self and mutual understandings. We quickly spot negative language patterns, help people move out of victimhood, provide more empowering meanings to their pain and overwhelm, and build resilience.

Personality Profiling Tool

One of the challenges of managing people is their diversity. Our personality profiling tool helps people to not only understand themselves better, but to relate to other members of the team. This is very different to other profiling tools.

Personal Leadership

We believe that everyone’s role in aged care is vital, all can step up as leaders. We don’t believe that the only leaders are those with a formal title or higher-ranking position. We thrive on giving people greater role clarity, strategies for impact and building synergy.

Consumers seek a quality service experience defined by the quality of your people. In times of rapid change, everyone must be flexible. Services are only as strong as their weakest link. Your strength relies on staff working at every level and taking personal leadership.

Our Training Programs

AgeWorks can offer one or two-hour training, half or full day training programs. Popular topics are:

  • The Aged Care Quality Standards
  • Incident Reporting and Continuous improvement
  • Mandatory and Elder Abuse Reporting
  • Understanding Physical and Chemical Restraint
  • Understanding Consumer-Directed Care, Innovative and Holistic Models of Care
  • Understanding Dementia (or BPSD) for all levels of staff
  • Team Building (including personality profiling)
  • Clinical Governance and Risk Management for Boards

 Also

  • Leadership Development (via all our training but specifically through coaching and mentoring programs).
  • Assistance with Onboarding programs for managers and care staff

A great deal of mandatory (compliance) training is now online. This can be cost-effective, but there’s a risk that staff can become passive and not engaged in their learning. When training becomes a tick the box exercise you can be certain that leaning is not being transferred back to the workplace and then it’s a waste of money. We have expertise in training evaluation to ensure your training resources are being used wisely.

Aged Care Workforce Development and Retention

Everyone knows of the difficulty in attracting and retaining quality people in aged care. A well planned and relevant staff development program helps to identify you as an employer of choice and builds your reputation and brand.

  • It is vital that you invest in training and development to attract and retain talent. High staff turnover leads to an unstable site, risk of complaints and non-compliance. The cost to replace a staff member is thought to be at least $5000, but many think the real cost of replacing staff is around 50% of their salary.
  • One of the frequent problems we see is services that fail to allocate enough resources to training. Online training is not cost-effective if it doesn’t lead to a transfer of learning back to the workplace. There is a risk it becomes passive learning if not supported in the right way.
  • Staff morale plummets when they do not have access to timely training support. It may lead to sick / stress leave, poor productivity. On the contrary, morale can soar when staff feel their organisation has invested in them and they have the right help and get greater job satisfaction.
  • You need ongoing training to ensure compliance with accreditation requirements. AgeWorks conducts a training needs analysis and then customises training to optimise and retain your workforce for improved service delivery.

Training Benefits and Outcomes

In today’s world, CEOs and managers are increasingly isolated and overwhelmed with complex problems and feeling under pressure (e.g. Royal Commission). Too much is expected from one or only a few people. 

It’s also difficult to find or keep a quality manager or team. Individuals often inherit leadership roles by accident and have little guidance, it’s easy to feel “bent out of shape” by a reliance on a predominantly poorly prepared workforce. In this environment it’s hard to focus on what to do next, let alone build a team and get the best from people. This is where AgeWorks can help.

  • If you are a CEO or manager, AgeWorks enables you to be the boss you always wished you’d had. To feel grounded, understand your individual style and that of others. To have clarity about where you are and where you’re going – and then give you the steps to get there.
  • We do this through well tested tools, training and tailored consultancy. 
  • What sets us apart from other education groups is our 40 years of solid “preparation”, our commitment to unleashing the often, overlooked potential of individuals and teams. 
  • We give you access to practical tools and resources developed around our key areas of focus: Who you are and where you are right now, where you’re going and how to get there.

“You don’t need to know every step, you just need to know the right step, right now”.

Call AgeWorks today for more information on training programs, coaching and mentoring, and optimising your workforce.