Building rural workforce capacity in rural communities through a reablement teaching program: The case of Family Based Care

This experimental project delivers and evaluates a reablement teaching program for staff at all levels of a community health care organisation known as Family Based Care (FBC). FBC provides services to clients across the lifespan in regional North and North West Tasmania. The teaching program, developed in consultation with staff at FBC, was delivered between March and June 2018. The program aims to enhance staff understanding of the concept and practice of reablement, to increase their capability by developing skills to stand back, observe and assess clients’ potential to gain greater independence, then work collaboratively with each client to identify individual goals. Specifically, the teaching program uses video recordings of support workers at FBC demonstrating real life examples of reablement in action. Staff from FBC took part in two, two-hour reablement training sessions. Data was collected from staff pre and post training using two survey instruments. The first survey focuses on ‘Activities of Daily Living’ and asked the staff member to assess their perception of their capacity to apply reablement to each activity. The second was designed to assess the extent to which each member of staff feels attuned or not with the reablement initiative. In addition, 8 – 12 staff and one or two of each of their clients were asked to reflect on their experience of reablement following the intervention. The analysis identifies the challenges, benefits and issues of building workforce capacity when changing to a reablement based approach for the delivery of community care services in regional areas.