Keep Able Reablement Podcasts
Keep Able is your go to authority on Wellness and Reablement. Our various podcasts cover discussions on real world issues and examples from people in the at home aged care support sector, specifically for CHSP providers.
Keep Able Reablement Podcasts
Reablement conversations: with Alison Vella
In this episode, Hilary O’Connell has invited Alison Vella, Quality and Practice Lead at Aspire4Life to join her to discuss the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of reablement, and what it can look like, including how to encourage clients to implement new habits and ideas to support their long-term independence.
The essence of reablement for Alison means: “encouraging and supporting someone to feel happy and satisfied, to get back to where they were or move ahead to where they want to be. That might be socially, functionally, or emotionally, it can be about their confidence and allowing them more freedom to be more independent.”
Hilary and Alison also discuss the importance of considering all areas of wellness and reablement as a holistic approach, including emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and environmental wellbeing and health.
Discover more reablement resources at keepable.com.au
Hello and welcome to ILA's Conversations About Reablement, where we talk to people from different backgrounds and roles across aging and aged care and get their perspectives on reablement. My name is Hilary O'Connell and I'm the principal advisor of healthy aging and reablement here at ILA. Today I'd like to welcome Alison Vila from Aspire for Life. Alison is the quality and practice lead at Aspire for Life, a leading provider of aged care assessment and planning services based in Queensland. Alison is a strong advocate for reablement, both when she's performing assessments for aged care services, when mentoring other staff, and in her current practice lead role. Alison also has 15 years' experience as a trainer and assessor, both online and in classroom environments. Tourism, hospitality, events, business and management students. So a very varied background. So welcome Alison and thank you for joining me today to talk about all things reablement. Before I get started, is there anything else that you'd like to add to my introduction? Is there anything that I've missed?
SPEAKER_01:No, I think you've covered that really well. And it's so nice to be talking to you today. It's my favorite topic of conversation. That's so good to hear.
SPEAKER_00:All right. Well, if um if the introduction was good enough and it sort of presented you well enough, I'd like to get going. Uh I have a series of questions for you about reablement. Um the first one would be what does short-term reablement mean to you?
SPEAKER_02:To me personally, it's about encouraging and supporting someone to feel happy and satisfied in its essence, to get back to where they were or move ahead to where they want to be. And that might be socially, functionally, emotionally, can be about their confidence and allowing them more freedom to be independent. So for me, it's the opportunity that we can give the clients that we work with, or anyone in reality, to live in a way that allows them to allows them to use their capabilities in the best way they are able to, or improve their capabilities. That's sort of in essence what it means to me.
SPEAKER_00:A great summary, I think, of what it is. How do you think it can help older people? And you've partly covered that, but I think you can probably expand on that from the experience that you have.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, in our roles as home support assessors, we've got the ability to talk to people about their goals, about what is important to them, and then encourage them to make even small changes that can help them to achieve those goals. It might be practical support such as an exercise program that they can participate in to improve mobility or activities and having safety assessments to change their environment so they can adjust to the way they complete their self-care tasks at home. It's about ensuring that they're confident and safe and still performing their own daily activities wherever they can. Accessing to new social opportunities is another really big opportunity that we look at too. We consider all the areas of wellness. You know, the old eight domains of wellness, we focus very heavily on a holistic approach nowadays, which is really fantastic. So we look at not just physical health, but also emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social, environmental, financial, all of those different domains. So short-term supports can have a really long-lasting impact, is how we need to look at it, such as an exercise program to reduce pain levels, um, introducing them to a social activity, which might be a really small step for someone, to bring new people into their life for long-term friendships or interests. It's all about improving their quality of life. Thank you for that.
SPEAKER_00:And I I'm so glad that you touched on that reablement isn't just about a person's physical health or their physical function, that it is so much more than that. Um, and that, as you say, we cover all of those domains and in a in a way of sort of improving someone's quality of life. So important.
SPEAKER_02:It's just brilliant.
SPEAKER_00:Excellent. All right, so what does short-term reablement look like when working with an older person as opposed to doing a task for them?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, as I said, for us it can be, you know, even just a one-off or a short-term service referral, like having that occupational therapist come to their home and look at safer ways of doing their daily tasks. Um, that then creates new habits and new ideas on how to do things, um, whether that be do things in a different way, just making things more sustainable for them because it's about that remaining independent, is the focus for what we do. For some people, considering any change can be really quite a scary concept, but in this industry, I really believe we've got the right people who can have that really supportive approach, give the great advice, and encourage a person to do things even slightly differently to ensure that they can remain independent. It's about giving them the right information and explaining why what we are recommending is going to have benefits to them and what that could look like, what strategies we are talking about and what steps the client can take. So sometimes we need to look at those short-term supports, even things like you know, short-term domestic assistance for somebody who might be recovering from an injury or a surgery, where we've got providers who also work to that concept of reablement. They're prepared to step in as needed and then step back, giving the client client their autonomy back and their confidence back. We've moved a long way from every single service being thought of as here forever, once put in place, and have moved more and more to motivating people to do as much as they can for themselves. So it could be just very small steps to a bigger goal, but every step is really important in the process.
SPEAKER_00:Do you ever consider the use of assistive technology at all as part of reablement?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Um, yeah, and look, there's so much information and everything out there nowadays. Um, I'm actually running uh RAS training at the moment. One of the activities that we do when we're talking about reablement, we actually ask them to look up the LiveUp website and spend a bit of time playing around in there. Um, and then we have discussions. You know, if you are doing an assessment for a client who has arthritis, what are some of the fabulous ideas you've just just come up with? Or, you know, we talk to different scenarios that are real life situations, and what are the things that we can talk to them about and give them that bit of information because so many of those sorts of things they may never have heard of before, um, and some of them are just so easy for them to get as well. And we're not talking, you know, thousands of dollars of equipment, we're talking about fairly simple ideas and strategies for them. So, yeah, absolutely. We we look at those quite a lot. So it doesn't always need to involve a direct service referral, it can be them just choosing to do something differently, and quite often a new piece of equipment is the way to go.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thank you for saying that. I I've just for for your uh information, we're in the process or we will be in the process of updating or um increasing the amount of information about assistive technology on the live up site. So that should be even more helpful to um your assessors as you as you pro progress. Another question is uh do you have an example of when short-term reablement has worked, and then also one when it hasn't? And what what made it successful or unsuccessful?
SPEAKER_02:Um, my absolute favorite example that always springs to mind when I get asked a question like that of a reablement that worked was a client that I saw a few years ago had experienced a couple of falls. It really knocked his confidence. In the assessment, we talked about what this meant for him. That included things like he was no longer attending his local community garden that he used to do very regularly, and he loved because he was really worried about having a fall in front of the other people. Um, he wasn't going to the shops, even for his basic needs as often because he um was now using a walking stick, and you know, it it was just really too confronting for him. So, what we actually did was linked him into the local falls prevention program. He attended that for six weeks, and then when I followed up with him, his initial comment to me was, Wow, this has changed my life. He was not using the stick anymore because the physiotherapist worked closely with him on improving his balance and confidence, reducing his risk of another potential fall, meaning he was back to going to the shops again wherever he wanted to, without worrying who would see him walking around town with his walking stick. He felt that he had the knowledge about his lowered risk of having a fall. And he said the group at the program was so much fun. He said they laughed as much as they did anything else in it, so it was really good for him socially, and he was back to his community garden, and he said, Oh, they were so excited to have me back. So it always that gentleman always springs to mind for me, which was fabulous.
SPEAKER_01:What a wonderful story, that one. Yeah, lovely. It's beautiful.
SPEAKER_02:Examples of where it hasn't worked, um they usually revolve around either the client has another health setback, which has been unavoidable for some reason, or where service provision under our programme, the Commonwealth Home Support Programme, hasn't been available for them, um, such as having support like some of the Allied Health Support in some regions, they've got a very, very long wait for access to that, or just not enough staff available to come and do supports for people. And so we're forever then, you know, suggesting they go back to their GPs to try and get a referral, etc., which can be an additional cost. So that's usually when we do have those that aren't successful, it usually unfortunately revolves around either of those two reasons, sadly.
SPEAKER_00:Do you um do you find as a rule that people, some of the clients that you talk to or their family members are are receptive to reablement, or are they sometimes a little bit wary of what does it mean?
SPEAKER_02:Um, to be honest, it all comes across in the language. So we don't sort of say to them, I'm going to put you under a period of reablement. We talk to what their goals are and what's the steps in the strategy to get them there. So we just focus on those positive changes and we talk to realistic changes, of course, as well. So we never set people up for failure, we set them up for success, even in those small steps. So yeah, I have I have never had anyone that has opted out of following any sort of strategies or steps, um, whether that's just the language that I use or whether it's I don't know, I do a fair bit of motivational interviewing as well. So I think sort of you know trying to evoke um change within people is is a bit of a skill as well. So that's something that I would love to see rolled out um nationally as well with what we do.
SPEAKER_00:It's so so suitable. Yeah, no, I agree with you. Certainly when I've been um working in reablement services, uh a similar sort of thing that I haven't had anybody who hasn't been receptive to it. Uh the only chimes that it has been unsuccessful would be because, as I said, another health event has come along or something like that that's you know put everything on hold. Um but yeah, generally people have been very receptive because most people do want to improve their function. They they want to feel better, you know, they want to feel less tired, they want to be able to do more as a rule. Definitely. Right. Okay. All right, we're almost on the last question. If if you had any advice for an organization preparing to deliver short-term reablement, what would you say to them? Maybe your top top three things or something along those lines.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think focus on what the person can do for themselves, begin with that and build on that instead of the other way around. I think that is, you know, the the best way to approach it, absolutely. So what are they capable of? Um that's what we should focus on, and then teach them to build on that capacity wherever it's appropriate. I think we all need to invest in training and knowledge and the motivation for staff to work in this way and have this focus because the success of their clients will be their reward for the effort. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:That feels like a really good place to conclude the conversation. I love that statement. So we've covered a number of topics, including how reablement can help people retain in their independence, how support staff play a key role in this, how the assessment staff play a key role as well, and some great examples of when working this way works and when it isn't quite so successful. So I'd thank you, I'd like to thank you again, Alison, Alison Vila, for joining me today. And for those of you listening, I hope you've enjoyed the conversations and to find more out more about what reablement is, please visit our keepable site at keepable.com.au. Thank you for listening. And thank you, Alison.
