Staff focus group, survey to help shape 'Legacy Teaching Culture' initiative
Friday, March 3, 2006 -- Craig Anderson
Despite routinely tiring shifts and tight personal schedules, Meadow Park staff have been meeting for an hour once-a-week to discuss ways to improve care, boost morale, and increase meaningful interactions with residents.

Staff members, along with residents and family, are actively taking part in the home’s “Legacy Teaching Culture” initiative - a broad-based effort to re-invigorate care provision and honour resident legacies.

The initiative was borne after Denise Bedard, the administrator, had an illuminating experience with a long term care resident who doggedly struggled back from a debilitating injury, reveling in his final years.

Participants in the staff focus group have recently collectively authored a survey, which was then stapled to all staff paycheques. It was sent with the hope of engendering honest and thorough commentary on ways to strengthen long term care from a variety of perspectives.

“There was a little negativity towards the survey because I think some people felt it was structured and didn’t allow for honesty,” says Dianne Hamilton, a health care aide and active member of the focus group. “But we said – write on extra paper if you need to. We want people to speak out, maybe they have an idea that hasn’t occurred to management.”

Questions like “what would you do if you were boss for a day?” dispelled some of the fears staff had about the survey, she adds.

Morale has been waning in recent years, says Hamilton, who joined the home in 1995. She attributes this not to poor attitudes but rather to an increasing workload and the ever-widening demographic in long term care.

Younger residents with complex needs change both the climate and provision of care, says Hamilton, who points out the challenges staff faced recently when a 500 lb. man who had suffered a paralyzing virus became a resident.

“This man is forty years old, sharing a room with three men over ninety. Eventually we couldn’t meet his needs,” says Hamilton.

The home, expecting to admit more residents who don’t fit the average profile of a long term care resident, is looking into courses to offer staff to help mitigate some of the daunting challenges of providing care for people with no other clinical options.

The changes that will be ushered in by “Legacy Teaching Culture” are then limited by the problems of funding and the changing health care system, although there are likely to be improvements through the more decentralized LHIN system. Even these changes, which are designed to do the most with current capacities, are difficult for some of the older staff, says Hamilton, including herself.

“It will take a bit of time,” she says. “When something new is implemented it can be difficult – people are often set in their ways. I, for one, don’t like a lot of change. We have to be more open to it, and through participation in this group I am slowly becoming more open too.”

The next step for all three focus groups is to hold their own day long seminar, fashioned after recently held “Enchantment” seminars.

Hamilton, who as a Northern Telecom employee joined a company group that would regularly volunteer at the London home, always suspected that long term care was her ideal career. Now she welcomes the opportunity to re-shape it from the inside, to increase interactions with residents and lighten the burdens of the nursing and caregiving staff.

“I am very positive about it,” she says.