Sharpening Our Focus, Enhancing Their Lives: An Assisted Living Personal Care Program

This 5-day (40-hour) personal care attendant training curriculum is designed to provide basic skills instruction and general orientation for employment in assisted living/personal care settings. Content also provides an excellent skills review to enhance performance of incumbent resident assistants and personal care attendants to improve quality of services and job satisfaction.

Training topics include:

Day 1:

• Basic knowledge of the work environment & expectations
• Communication skills & barriers to effective communication
• Managing conflict
• Ethics, HIPAA, resident rights, advance directives
• Basic nutrition & meeting residents' dietary needs

Day 2:

• Recognizing, reporting & preventing elder abuse
• Understanding psychosocial needs of elders
• Understanding cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's, dementia
• Managing difficult behaviors
• Reality orientation, validation therapy, communication guidelines
• Bladder and bowel incontinence

Day 3:

• Pathogens, chain of infection
• Preventing & controlling the spread of infection
• Proper handwashing technique
• Standard precautions, use of personal protective equipment
• Isolation precautions, MSRA/VRE infections
• Hazcom/MSDS, safety & accident prevention
• Personal safety, resident safety, environmental risk factors
• Heimlich maneuver, obstructed airway
• Seizures & fainting, hemorrhage & shock
• Caring for a dying resident

Days 4 & 5:

Attention focuses on techniques to properly perform a wide array of skills and personal care tasks. The curriculum provides procedures for consistent instruction, practice and return demonstration of personal care skills.

A sampling of step-by-step skill procedures includes:

• Handwashing, using personal protective equipment (PPE)
• Clearing an obstructed airway, care of the falling resident
• Taking temperature & vital signs (TPR, BP)
• Assisting with bath or shower
• Daily hair care, shampooing hair, shaving
• Oral care, dentures, brushing teeth, eyeglasses
• Morning and bedtime care
• Bed making
• Assisting with bed, chair, wheelchair transfers
• Ambulation, assistance with cane & walker

Instructional Resources

This turnkey suite of instructional resources includes:

• Course syllabus and learning objectives by topic
• Instructional companion guide for trainers
• Reproducible student course text/workbook with review questions
• Reproducible skills mastery checklist & detailed step-by-step procedures (40 skills)
• Course quizzes, answer keys, grade sheets, attendance sheets

Medication Assistance Training

Included with the Assisted Living/Personal Care curriculum is an optional 8-hour stand-alone Medication Assistance training course introducing responsibilities and common procedures for properly assisting residents to take their medication. The curricular resources for this module include instructor's lesson plan, student course reading assignment, sample medication documentation forms, course test & answer key.

Students learn:

• Categories and desired effects of commonly given prescription & OTC medications (e.g. blood pressure, heart, circulatory,gastrointestinal, nervous system, respiratory, immune, cholesterol reducing, bone building, anti-arthritis, eyes, ears, diabetes, pain, anxiety, PRN medications)
• Medication routes & administration procedures
• Infection control when handling medications
• Medication assistance recording & reporting requirements
• Observation for adverse reactions
• Medication errors, reporting & safeguards for minimizing risks

Instructional Resource Binder Item Code:    PCA-T
Student Textbook Item Code: PCA-S

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