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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Exploring experiences of Personal Support Worker education in Ontario, Canada | | Author(s) | Christine Kelly |
| Journal title | Health and Social Care in the Community, vol 25, no 4, July 2017 |
| Publisher | Wiley, July 2017 |
| Pages | pp 1430-1438 |
| Source | wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hsc |
| Keywords | Care support workers ; Ageing process ; Physical disabilities ; University education ; Training [welfare work] ; Policy ; Canada. |
| Annotation | There is growing attention to the training and education of Personal Support Workers, or PSWs, who work in community, home and long-term care settings supporting older people and people with disabilities. In Ontario, Canada, amid a volatile policy landscape, the provincial government launched an effort to standardise PSW education. Using qualitative methods, this study considered the question: What are the central educational issues reflected by students, working PSWs and key informants, and are they addressed by the PSW programme and training standards? Phase one was a public domain analysis completed between January and March 2014 and updated for major developments after that period. Phase two, completed between August 2014 and March 2015, included 15 key informant interviews and focus group discussions and mini-phone interviews with 35 working PSWs and current PSW students. According to the participants, the central educational issues are: casualisation of labour that is not conveyed in educational recruitment efforts, disconnect between theory and working conditions, overemphasis on long-term care as a career path, and variability of PSW education options. While the standards should help to address the final issue, they do not address the other key issues raised, which have to do with the structural organisation of work. Thus there is a disconnect between the experiences of students, PSWs and key informants and the policy decisions surrounding this sector. This is particularly significant as education is often touted as a panacea for issues in long-term and community care. In fact the curriculum of some of the PSW programmes, especially those in public college settings, is robust. Yet the underlying issues will remain barring a structural overhaul of the organisation of long-term and community care sectors founded on a social revaluing of older people and the gendered work of care. (JL). |
| Accession Number | CPA-170630206 A |
| Classmark | QRS: BG: BN: V7M: QW: QAD: 7S |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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