The beginning stages of caregiving, especially the initial months of joining a new care home can be challenging for new caregivers. And this is a normal part of getting familiar with the practical, real-life scenarios of a care home for new caregivers.
If you are a care home owner and have hired new caregivers, you can make their new journey in your care home a smooth sailing one with these tips:
1) Train them with the right medication administration practices
Getting medication administration right is crucial to ensuring medication safety of care home residents. As part of providing training to your new caregivers, it’s important to educate them about the 5 Rs of medication administration which includes right patient, right drug, right dose, right route, and right time.
Another important step to making administering medication less of a challenge for new caregivers is to use eMAR (electronic MAR charts). Electronic MAR simplifies the complexities involved with conventional MAR charts. It eliminates the paper-based hassles associated with MAR charts . Learn how electronic MAR can work for your care home at https://www.electronicmar.co.uk/emar/.
2) Ask them to respect the privacy of the residents
The key to providing the right care to care home residents is to striking the right balance between assisting them and respecting their privacy. It’s crucial to teach new caregivers about the importance of maintaining the residents’ dignity.
For example, if a particular resident prefers changing his/her clothes or use the washroom on their own, it’s important for the caregiver to respect their dignity. As part of ensuring proper safety of the resident, the caregiver can keep a close watch of the resident.
3) Encourage them to plan their daily work schedule
Given the number of tasks that are to be done in care homes every day, care workers can get overburdened and burn out. Therefore, it’s important for new caregivers to learn to plan their daily work schedule.
4) Encourage them to take breaks
New caregivers aren’t familiar with the working environment of care homes. Therefore, they can easily stress out. As part of ensuring the well-being of the residents, make sure to encourage them to take breaks in between the working hours. Taking breaks help caregivers stay productive and maintain efficiency in their work.
5) Scheduling and planning for activities
Activities and family visits are an integral part of providing holistic care to care home residents. Activities such as household chores, story-telling, and family visits are of a great help when it comes to ensuring that the residents do not experience loneliness. It’s important to teach new caregivers to include the right activities as part of scheduling the overall care plan.
With electronic MAR sheet medication administration and documentation, care workers can save time and focus on scheduling care home activities.
