This appeared last week:
Critical staff shortages affect more than frontline roles
Aged care’s technology and innovation workforce is also experiencing recruitment and retention issues and gaps in skill requirements, write Anne Livingstone and Georgie Gould.
The Aged Care Industry Information Technology Council has concentrated efforts over the past six years on the enabling role that technology can play, but much of our focus has particularly been on what that means for service model design – and specifically workforce development.
From our Technology Aged Care Roadmap in 2017 to the recent projects we have just concluded – including on clinical systems in residential aged care, and benchmarking digital maturity across community care and residential aged care – the needs and requirements of an adequate and skilled workforce have been a key focus.
In these recent research projects, we have identified several issues related to technology and innovation workforces such as the gaps in skill requirements and the retention and recruitment issues – including the current high level of tech and digital roles exiting the sector.
Through this work, we are acutely aware of the workforce shortages this sector is experiencing with respect to the needs of a digitally maturing aged and community care industry.
New workforce roles are required to ensure evidenced based technological and innovative transformations can be realised.
We hear firsthand in our national roundtables the challenges of maintaining and implementing the necessary requirements across technology infrastructure, support, and operations. It is evident the key roles needed for procurement, installation, maintenance, and operation of various technologies are both under-resourced and forecasted to be in short supply long term.
This has been reinforced in the preliminary findings of our ongoing Innovation and Technology Workforce Survey.
Early results highlight the high turnover of technical staff in a number of roles, with reports of up to 65 per cent turnover. Service providers have also indicated the difficult position they are in when recruiting new staff and offering competitive wages for these roles.
We are committed to ensuring we have a national strategy to inform building a better technology and innovation workforce.
In this survey, we have reflected on our research for the Department of Health and Aged Care – the CARE-IT Report – and its findings with respect to technology and digital workforces. Our study found that technology can make a significant contribution to supporting the aged care workforce and quality care delivery, but that improvements are needed to ensure that the workforce is truly digitally enabled and mature. These include:
- workforce technology training and support are not part of common practice
- 35.8 per cent of organisations fail to provide any training or support in specific areas such as cybersecurity, phishing, data sensitivity, and malware
- the majority of the organisations do not assess potential workforce members for their digital literacy as part of their recruitment and selection process.
These new roles will allow service providers to appropriately scale the introduction of new technologies and significantly improve the organisation’s digital maturity.
In a recent collaboration with the Australian Digital Health Agency, our national investigation into the use of clinical software in residential aged care facilities found investment in technology workforce training has proven to reduce staff turnover.
In this project, we also found that workforce redesign is critical to enabling the wider program of transformational change needed. New workforce roles are required to ensure evidenced-based technological and innovative transformations can be realised. These new roles will allow service providers to appropriately scale the introduction of new technologies and significantly improve the organisation’s digital maturity.
We are continuing our workforce survey to gain further insights into technology and innovation workforce development. The survey is for both residential aged care and community care providers. Ideally, the person completing this survey has oversight of the orgainsation’s technology and innovation workforce.
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Anne Livingstone is executive lead, and Georgie Gould is secretariat, at the Aged Care Industry Information Technology Council
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Sadly I find myself totally un-surprised by the gist of this article pointing out that the aged care sector is struggling to find, and retain, technical staff.
It is widely known that the aged care sector in general is pushed close to breaking point just trying to find basic care staff – let alone registered nurses 24/7 – so finding adequate tech staff was always going to be a huge challenge.
To me the key to this will be very clever technical design that ensures that all tech is both robust, effective and valuable to the staff while also being totally intuitive to use and having a high ROI. That said I realise this is a pretty big ask – to say the least!!!
Anyone have any other clever ideas?
David.
3 comments:
Let's see if I've got this right....
Aged care is about looking after the daily needs of old people, who are generally unable to look after themselves. Most, if not all the staff at an aged care facility do not provide healthcare - that is provided by medical staff, either internal or external.
IT can be useful when it assists and/or replaces tasks undertaken by humans.
What IT can replace what aged care staff do? Help them get dressed/undressed? Respond to requests for food and drink? Provide human contact and company? Change their dressings? Cut their hair?
Suggestions are welcome, but I bet the answer is that IT cannot replace anything significant a human carer does.
Maybe IT can do things that a human carer doesn't do e.g. 24/7 monitoring. This would be a major additional cost with no reduction in existing costs but potentially an additional cost as carers rush to check up on a patient who has triggered an alarm.
When it comes to aged care, as opposed to aged medical care, throwing technology at something without establishing a need, a validation of value and knowledge of costs is irresponsible.
As it says at the top of the page "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
If I'm wrong, please tell me how and where?
Australia is extremely lucky to have an influx of people from other countries who are willing to care for its elderly people, and to be honest, Australians could probably learn a lot about respect and valuing the elderly from these cultures.
We are also entering a period where many in aged care speak English as a second language.
Will the white Anglo ladies running various federal health agencies and department tackle the challenge?
Bernard there are aspect where especially robotics can make an enormous difference. That said I generally agree with what you are saying. In the context of what ADHA and the Aged Care IT folk are saying I agree with you 200%
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