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Saint Elizabeth researchers publish study on integrating care

Unregulated health care providers are an integral part of home and community care. In Ontario, they are known as Personal Support Workers. They provide over 70% of all home care services, but how well their work is aligned with evidence-based care is not known. Although PSWs provide the majority of home care, there is also not a wide understanding of how they work with interdisciplinary care teams.

In this study, we looked at PSWs’ involvement in best-practice care for stroke survivors and their caregivers. We wanted to describe what PSWs do now, how other members of stroke care teams work with PSWs, and what might be done to increase PSWs’ contributions to stroke survivors’ rehabilitation and re-entry into home and community life.

What did we find?
We found that home care PSWs make significant contributions to best-practice care of stroke survivors and their caregivers. However, other health care providers are not fully aware of what PSWs are doing or what they could be doing, and the impact of the PSWs’ contributions to team-based stroke care is not as much as it could be. To help increase awareness and increase PSWs’ contributions, we developed a way of understanding and communicating what PSWs can do.

Innovative approach:

We developed “OCAR” to understand the PSW role in an integrated team and to optimize their role to support best-practices in care. “OCAR” stands for:

Observe – PSWs pay careful attention and ask questions to notice or learn important issues about care that other members of the care team, including caregivers, should know.

Coach – PSWs encourage or explain and demonstrate how to carry out an activity that a member of the care team has recommended for care.

Assist – PSWs help a home care client and caregiver to complete tasks through physical help or verbal cueing, in keeping with the care recommended by the health care team.

Report – PSWs provide an account of an important observation, action, or change to members of the health care team.

Next steps:

Using OCAR could improve communication, information sharing, and awareness of roles among all members of an interprofessional health care team. We continue to expand the use of this framework to enhance interdisciplinary collaboration across various settings.

To read the article published in Journal of Research in Interprofessional Practice and Education, click here.