A new kind of classroom Employees looking to further their careers get a helping hand by WHITNEY BLACK
PRACTICAL LEARNING: Students in COTR’s Resident Care Attendant program at Joseph Creek Care Village in Cranbrook practise their skills on dolls and each other. —photo courtesy Golden Life Management
Students enrolled in College of the Rockies’ (COTR) Resident Care Attendant (RCA) program are learning first-hand what it takes to work in resident care facilities.
The college and Golden Life Management have partnered to create a new and innovative RCA program. The program is running at Golden Life Management’s Rose Wood Village in Trail, Rocky Mountain Village in Fernie and Joseph Creek Care Village in Cranbrook.
Gary Johnson, dean of health programs at COTR, said this program is aimed at people who work in the laundry, kitchen or housekeeping areas and are looking to upgrade to become an RCA.
Learning on the job
Instead of students taking the traditional program at the college—in which they would spend 20 weeks learning all the theory in class followed by a 12-week practicum in a resident care facility—the new program places students in one of Golden Life Management’s care villages from start to finish.
“They are effectively working part time (in the care village),” said Peter Reid, marketing manager for Golden Life Management. “They are working under the guidance of other residential care aides, RNs and LPNs, so they are certainly not causing any risk to anybody.”
Students spend half of their time working in the care village, learning practical aspects of the job—which would have been taught to them through labwork at the college—and the other half of the time working on online courses to learn the theory. All assessments are still done at the college, which guarantees the students are in fact learning what they need to know before the college certifies them.
Instructors from the college visit the students and the mentor RNs bi-weekly to get updates on how each student is progressing and also to discuss with the RNs what the students should be learning at that moment.
“Our instructors sit with these RNs and go over the schedule of labs and skills,” said Johnson. “It’s a train-the-trainer situation.”
Both Reid and Johnson believe the new program is positive for everyone involved. The students are benefiting from the practical knowledge they are acquiring, but they are not the only ones getting something out of it.
“The residents get the benefit of being exposed to new people who really want to be there,” said Reid. “The students are extremely enthusiastic and it brings a different kind of feel to the neighbourhoods they are in.”
A program with potential
Johnson hopes this new program will be advantageous to not only the students in the Kootenay region, but also to anyone working in the health care industry looking to advance their career.
“If we look beyond Golden Life and we look at Interior Health and the health care system,” Johnson said, “the number of employees who might want to upgrade from kitchen work and so on into the resident care field is most likely significant. That is where I really see the growth of this program.”
Key Education contacts
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