Personal Caregiver Training Curriculum for Employees

Help your learners become successful Penn Foster students. This course gives an introduction to health care, the health care industry, and the roles that health care workers play in that industry.

By the end of this course, your learners will be able to do the following:

• Identify skills needed to be a confident and independent online learner
• Describe the United States healthcare industry and the professional roles within it

This course discusses the importance of human interaction, including verbal and nonverbal communication, the communication feedback loop, barriers, cultural competence, and effective communication techniques. Applying communication skills to assist in caring for others will be addressed. Therapeutic communication skills and unique practices involved with caring for special populations will be covered. This course also introduces basic medical definitions and abbreviations, including word analysis, word usage, roots, prefix and suffix, with an emphasis placed on spelling and constructing medical terms. Your learners will be given an introduction to the positional and directional terms used to describe the human body.

By the end of this course, your learners will be able to do the following:

• Summarize the elements of interpersonal communication
• Identify the best practices for communicating with patients
• Define medical terms and regions and structures of the body by analyzing medical terms

In this course, your learners will learn how law affects medical practitioners, the origin of law that affects medical professionals, the basics of the process of litigation and its alternatives, the common-law basis for the confidentiality of health-care information, and the laws regulating healthcare information collected and maintained by government agencies.

By the end of this course, your learners will be able to do the following:

• Interpret civil and criminal laws related to healthcare
• Assess ethical issues healthcare professional face today
• Apply confidentiality laws and regulations

This course is designed to train your learners in providing personal care to patients to meet their physical, psychological, and mental needs. They'll develop homemaking and organizational skills as well as a working knowledge of IADLs. They'll learn to apply standard practices and safety procedures. The course demonstrates how to take vital signs. They'll learn to perform a basic health assessment with concentration on observing patients for condition changes. This course discusses basic infection control and prevention strategies, with emphasis on handwashing and bag technique. They'll explore how to prevent spread of infection as well as special precautions. The course also demonstrates safety precautions and procedures for maintaining a clean and safe environment for the worker (aide), for patients in the home, at outside locations, and while transporting, along with proper body mechanics.

By the end of this course, your learners will be able to do the following:

• Explain the procedures for maintaining a safe and healthy environment for both clients and yourself
• Identify personal care tasks, including the steps involved in bedmaking and elimination care
• Describe specimen collection and assessment procedures and other special procedures needed for client care

This course provides an overview of various dimensions of aging, including the aging process and how to provide competent care to the aging patient. It explores normal biological aging, attitudes toward aging, myths of aging, and how to monitor and assess for changes in psychosocial and functional status. It teaches how to develop an instructional plan for families to effectively manage physiologic and/or psychosocial changes. It also discusses end of life issues. Finally, it covers how to identify and handle emergency situations.

By the end of this course, your learners will be able to do the following:

• Describe human needs and considerations and the documentation required when meeting those needs for clients
• Explain how to care for clients at any stage of life
• Describe types of special client needs, emergency situations, and emergency situation procedures