Accreditation helps staff reaffirm importance of family education
Rosebridge to use newsletter to invite families to in-service
Tuesday March 25, 2008 -- Deron Hamel
One of the benefits of Rosebridge Manor’s March 6 accreditation process was that staff members at the Jasper long-term care home realized that more can be done to engage family members in resident care.

A great way to collaborate with families is through education. Currently, Rosebridge Manor utilizes support groups to help engage families and there are constant informal educational discussions between staff members and families.

Surveyors from the Canadian Council on Health Services Accreditation (CCHSA) asked the home about specific areas where improvements could be made and staff members shared their thoughts.

Thanks to this dialogue between surveyors and staff members, measures such as teaching family members hand-washing techniques will be planned. This is an important area of resident safety that Dorothy Broeders-Morin, the home’s administrator, feels needs to be stressed more.

“We have the dry hand-wash at all the doors but there’s a definite technique when it comes to using (the dispensers),” she says. “So we’re going to look at that and put some diagrams out there . . . it all helps us better our care.”

Broeders-Morin says the next step for the home is to start advertising in-services to families in the monthly newsletter to engage them in educational forums. These in-services have been helpful to staff members and Broeders-Morin feels they can also benefit families.

Another area of focus for the home will be continuing to educate families about dementia, says Broeders-Morin. Families of residents with dementia have often struggled to understand the condition and further education could help enlighten people.

“People come into homes to visit (residents who have dementia) and they play a big part in their lives, so it really would be helpful if we included families more in dementia (education),” says Broeders-Morin.

From March 3-7, surveyors from the CCHSA visited 16 of OMNI’s 17 long-term care homes as part of the company’s corporate accreditation process.

The purpose of accreditation is to ensure that organizations continuously evaluate, improve and report their success and growth.

While each of OMNI’s homes has been independently accredited in the past, this is the first time the company has sought corporate accreditation.

Nancy Unsworth, the home’s director of care, notes that the accreditation process is a “benchmark” to gauge success within the long-term care sector and feels it will help OMNI homes achieve the goal of bringing the best quality of care to residents.

“I very much enjoyed the process and it’s a wonderful network to work with,” says Unsworth.

What did your home learn from accreditation? To share your stories, please contact deron(at)axiomnews.ca.

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