Older People: Key Knowledge and Skills for Providing Effective Support.
'Older People: Key Knowledge and Skills for Providing Effective Support' is a 3-day course from the Association for Psychological Therapies (APT), a leading provider of accredited courses for professionals working in mental health and related areas.
It is the only training on this topic that is APT-accredited and also gives you access to APT’s relevant downloadable resources for use post-course. The course is available for teams/organizations and can be attended face-to-face or online. (2-day version also available.)
Executive Summary:
This course aims to equip professionals with the knowledge and skills to interact powerfully and beneficially in the most frequent and fundamental interactions with older people - both formally and informally. It therefore covers: the image of ageing in society; person-centered care; the physical health problems associated with increasing age; the assessment of physical and mental health; how to enhance therapeutic contact; why it is important to know the person's life history and current situation; and how to match client and helper. Students attending this course can expect to feel overall more 'skilled up' as a professional working with older people.
The course covers:
- The image of ageing in society in general, and for participants. How a speaker's age influences the perception of what they say. Positive images of ageing – the grey panthers etc.
- person-centered care its history, current usage, and what it means in terms of the actions we should take (listening, recognising differences, treating people with dignity and respect and, especially, helping people make informed choices).
- Physical health problems associated with increasing age.
- Assessment: including physical and mental health, cognitive functioning, strokes, head injuries, adaptive functioning, social functioning. And methods (self-report, reports from others, observation), goals of assessment (screening, diagnosis, understanding). Risk assessment.
- Factors enhancing both formal and informal therapeutic contact: The skills of being less abstract and refraining from 'interpretations', how to compensate for reduction in memory, being flexible in session length, using informal interactions, flexible location. How to 'socialize' into therapy both the patient and family. How to be active rather than passive, how to be aware of age contrast in goal setting and empathy. Spotting your own latent ageism and eradicating it.
- Interview skills: listening, building rapport, credibility and empathy.
- Enhancing therapeutic conversations: Open questions, writing things down, flexibility on length of session, setting up a session so the person can hear and see you, helping the person to cope with memory problems, adjusting the length and physical setup of sessions.
- Life story: putting emotional responses in context, why it is important to know the person's life history and current situation.
- Matching client and helper: how to utilize the team most effectively, what to do when you don't 'make contact' with a person, how to choose the best 'key worker'.
What the course will do for you:
- You will be aware of the prejudice and discrimination – both deliberate and accidental – that older people experience, and have a feeling for what this must feel like. You will be aware whether you have any prejudice in your own attitudes, and how you may minimize it.
- You may be surprised at the power and influence yielded by many older people.
- You will know about the 'how and why' of treating people as individuals.
- You will know what older people can and cannot do, physically, and why they cannot do what they cannot do.
- You will be able to assess the physical and mental health of the people in your care: you will know what you are looking for and how and where to look for it.
- You will know the most common risks associated with older people.
- You will be able to get on better and more skillfully with your clients, and also their families.
- You will be able to talk much better with your clients: to have conversations which are more useful and more enjoyable.
- You will be able much better to empathize with your clients, and to know better how to respond to them.
- You will feel overall 'skilled up' as a professional working with older people.
What you receive as a result of attending the training:
You will be registered as having attended the course, thereby gaining APT's Level 1 accreditation, and receive a certificate to this effect. The accreditation gives you access to online resources associated with the course and access to the online exam if you wish to uprate your APT accreditation to Level 2.
Your registration lasts indefinitely, and your accreditation lasts for 3 years and is renewable by sitting an online refresher which also upgrades your accreditation to APT Level 2 if you are successful in the associated online exam.
Your accreditation is given value by the fact of over 150,000 people having attended APT training. See APT accreditation for full details.
Booking this training is easy...Booking Options... for individuals or small groups For teams and organizations:
We bring the course and tutor to you, for an all-inclusive fee. Price (3-day version): $12,400 (plus tutor travel and accommodation expenses) for a group of up to 15 people. Extra delegates: $810 per person. Price (2-day version): $9,085 (plus tutor travel and accommodation expenses) for a group of up to 15 people. Extra delegates: $540 per person. Option 2: Online Live and Exclusive course: Live and interactive online course, delivered via Zoom or Teams* exclusively for your team or organization. Price (3-day version): $7,760* for a group of up to 15 people (price includes a workbook for every delegate, posted to one address, or a PDF version can be provided). Extra delegates $510 per person. Price (2-day version): $5,600* for a group of up to 15 people (price includes a workbook for every delegate, posted to one address, or a PDF version can be provided). Extra delegates $340 per person. *We standardly deliver courses via Zoom (which is recommended). If you would prefer to use Microsoft Teams, there is an additional charge of $160 CAD per day. Option 3: 'Train the Trainer': If you or a colleague are a senior professional (e.g. consultant psychologist) and have a talent for communication and teaching, then you are welcome to apply to become an APT-accredited tutor. You could then tutor the course in your own organization, under license. This is not only a highly appropriate use of senior professionals, but it also saves your organization the tutor-component of the fee each time you run it or your chosen modules (50% of the face-to-face fee, regardless of whether the course is held online or face-to-face). To see the full benefits of this and to see whether you are eligible, click the button:
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Quick Links
Key Knowledge & Skills for Working with Older People ❯
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Feedback Ratings.
We continuously monitor the quality of our training by obtaining feedback on the two key scales of relevance and presentation from every course delegate. Below are the average ratings for the last ten runnings of this course, which are updated periodically.
Face-to-Face
Presentation: 96%
Relevance: 91%
Reviews.
APT prides itself on the feedback we receive about our courses. Below are just some of the great comments the 'Older People: Key Knowledge and Skills for Providing Effective Support' course has received.
"Hooray, the best presented, organized, stress-free course I have ever attended since working within mental health nursing. All sessions were relevant to my area of nursing. I hope to be attending future courses with APT."
"I would recommend this course to anybody working with older people, be they nurses, occupational therapists, doctors, family members and carers."
