Aarhus is implementing assisted living technologies and a healthy transfer culture.
Our aim is to reduce the number of work-accidents related to transferring patients/citizens. We are aiming to teach transferring from a rehabilitating perspective, which means we always focus on the citizen ́s abilities and try to preserve these.
There were 3 goals when the project was started: to reduce the number of work injuries (displacement), re-implement “from 2 to 1” (focus of one caregiver transferring the citizen instead of two) and establishing a common uniform ergonomics teaching across the areas of the Municipalities (before the teaching was distributed to the areas).
The project listed 12 areas to work with to reach the three goals - the Education Center is one of them. In the implementation phase, co-involvement of former teachers and the establishment of 15 working groups created the necessary ownership. It was very important to focus on work environment and among educators and to deal with their fear of not being good enough compared to the others. This very involving way of working with the implementation paid off, because the teachers moved from mostly sceptical to mostly enthusiastic in a very short time.
The main beneficiaries are the care staff, their leaders and the citizens. The main target group are the employees who are caregivers to senior citizens who are vulnerable, sick and in bad condition.
Resources needed
The Assisted Living Technology Educational Center costs approximately 650.000 Danish kr. (87.000 €) per year. The transition of a warehouse to the The Assisted Living Technology Educational Center did cost approximately 1.000.000 Danish kr. (134.000 €) (off expense).
Evidence of success
The most valuable benefits are that we have reduced the number of injuries when transferring patients/citizens, and we now have a systematic way of training all care staff within transferring citizens and using assisted living technologies.
We have indication of a positive impact of the degree of use of the assisted living devices and technologies and the employees benefit from knowledge sharing.
The implementation was successful due to the very deliberate use of involvement of the stakeholder
Potential for learning or transfer
This practise can be transferred both in Denmark and abroad. A country like Norway has worked with the same challenges and goals and according to Per Halvor Lunde (Norwegian specialist in transferring techniques) our Education Center is a model example on how to work. The practise is implemented on an on-going basis. There is a strong need for working in this way if you want to change people’s way of working.
Tags: Communication, Education, Empowerment, Information, Technology
