UNews - Sienna Caspar

Person-centred care for Alberta’s aging population the focus of upcoming PUBlic Professor Series talk

trevor.kenney — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 21:19:22 +0000

Canada and Alberta’s population is aging. As a result, the number of individuals who are going to require care in residential long-term care homes is only going to increase. How can society ensure that the care provided in these homes is the best it can possibly be?

Dr. Sienna Caspar worked as a recreation therapist in health care for close to 20 years before she decided to go back to school.

Dr. Sienna Caspar, ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge associate professor and program coordinator in the Faculty of Health Sciences’ Therapeutic Recreation program, has developed strategies that bring person-centred care to the forefront in continuing-care homes. She’ll discuss those strategies, along with the challenges facilities face in implementing change, as part of her upcoming PUBlic Professor Series talk, Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023, at the Sandman Signature Lodge.

Person-Centred Care from Rhetoric to Reality: exploring the role of knowledge translation and mobilization in health care will delve into the important issue of how to consistently provide person-centred care in a long-term care setting.

The movement away from task-oriented care toward person-centred care (care based on residents’ individualized care needs and preferences) is considered by many to be essential to both the quality of care and quality of life of people residing in long-term, residential care homes, especially of those who have Alzheimer disease or a related dementia.

“In this talk, I will share four key findings from over a decade of research that help us to understand the intervention factors that best support the uptake of practice and culture change initiatives aimed at increasing the provision of person-centred care,” says Caspar. “I’ll conclude this conversation with an exploration of the organizational systems that have supported or hindered my knowledge translation and mobilization efforts in health-care settings.”

Caspar worked as a recreation therapist in health care for close to 20 years before she decided to go back to school because she had a burning question. She wanted to know why person-centred care was so hard to implement. And she knew she needed to learn more about organizational behaviour and organizational change to find answers.

Since completing her PhD, Caspar has focused her research on understanding the challenges of implementing person-centred care and finding ways to make it easier for continuing-care homes to adopt this type of care. While many continuing care homes profess to provide person-centred care, the reality is that many struggle to consistently achieve this laudable goal.

This is the second of the six-part PUBlic Professor Series of talks and the first to represent research work out of the Faculty of Health Sciences. Initiated in 2014, the monthly lecture series is designed to spark thought-provoking discussions and bring a diverse group of experts and researchers from the ULethbridge campus right into the community.

Check out the PUBlic Professor Series web page for the 2023/24 talk schedule, to register for priority seating or join the series mailing list.

U of L researcher wins national award for study on empowering long-term care staff

caroline.zentner — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 17:35:19 +0000

A published study by Dr. Sienna Caspar, a researcher and associate professor in the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Faculty of Health Sciences, has been selected by Mather Institute as a Bronze Award recipient of the 2021 Innovative Research on Aging Awards.

As an internationally recognized resource for research and information about wellness, aging, and trends in senior living, Mather Institute invited submissions by researchers from universities and organizations around the world for this year’s awards, which cover a variety of categories from Aging in Place to Technological Advancements for Older Adults, and beyond. Caspar was honoured in the Health and Well-Being of Senior Living Residents award category for her 2020 study of the Feasible and Sustainable Culture Change Initiative (FASCCI) model, designed to improve person-centred care by empowering long-term care staff.

“The Innovative Research on Aging Award honours Dr. Caspar for her work in demonstrating the effectiveness of the FASCCI model in continually improving everyday care practices,” said Dr. Cate O’Brien, vice-president and director, Mather Institute. “These awards honour applied research with practical implications for the senior living industry. We hope these award-winning studies will spark ideas in senior living organizations across the country and around the world.”

The study focused on one care home where participating staff members were encouraged to practice making small changes during mealtimes to improve patient care. Findings revealed that use of the FASCCI model led to improved team leadership, communication, and collaborative decision-making.

“I’m very honoured to receive this award from Mather Institute,” says Caspar, who teaches in the U of L’s Therapeutic Recreation program. “The results of the study showed long-term care staff, when given the power to initiate change, led the way to more person-centred care in residential care homes. The model we use can be easily implemented without requiring a lot of extra resources.”

The full report on the Innovative Research on Aging Award recipients, Revealing Research 2021, is available at Mather Institute.

Care labour the focus of Liberal Education Symposium

trevor.kenney — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 16:26:15 +0000

The global pandemic has shone a light on many different facets of society but perhaps none more than on those who provide care. Care labour — what is it, what does it mean to you, how does it affect the economy, how is it related to ethics, gender, sexuality and ability? These are just some of the questions that will be explored at the School of Liberal Education’s fourth annual Liberal Education Symposium.

For the first time, the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge will offer the symposium in an online format, inviting the community at large to participate. The event takes place Friday, September 25 from 1 to 4:30 p.m. and registration is free.

“When we talk about essential workers like doctors, nurses, teachers, daycare providers, janitors and housekeepers, we are talking about those who take care of others. Although the term care labour has been taken up recently to describe this kind of work, the questions it prompts have been around a long time,” says Dr. Jan Newberry, a professor in the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ’s Department of Anthropology and one of the three keynote symposium panelists. “What does it even mean to say that we care? For the planet? For our communities? For one another?”

In her talk, Newberry will use relationality to consider forms of care and what the renewed questions about care labour tell us about humans, our connections to others, and social justice.

She will be joined by Tanya Pace-Crosschild (BSc ’98), the director of Opokaa’sin Early Intervention Society, an Indigenous Family Resource network that provides programs and services for urban Indigenous families in southern Alberta. Pace-Crosschild will discuss the importance of accessible, affordable and quality driven childcare.

As well, Dr. Sienna Caspar, an associate professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences, will share her research on care aid engagement.

“There is now an overwhelming body of evidence to show that engaged staff really do deliver better health care. By engaged staff I mean staff who are committed to their organization and emotionally invested in their work,” says Caspar. “Yet despite the evidence, most long-term and continuing care settings are unsuccessful in creating a truly engaged workforce.”

The symposium opens at 1 p.m. with introductory remarks, followed by the keynote panel presentation at 1:15 p.m. and a question and answer session at 2 p.m. Participants can then choose from a selection of break-out sessions on a broad range of topics, each with a host to present a topic and facilitate discussion.

“This is an entirely different format than we have presented in the past, and it may also bring more people into the conversation by offering these discussions online,” says Shelly
Wismath, dean of the School of Liberal Education. “Care labour is such an important issue and in the midst of a pandemic situation, everyone is understanding just how essential care is to the health and well-being of our society.”

Registration is free for the symposium and is available on the conference web page.

U of L researcher to launch model proven to improve person-centred care practices in residential care homes

caroline.zentner — Tue, 12 May 2020 15:59:12 +0000

Residential care homes have been especially hard hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing gaps in the health-care system as both elderly residents and the staff who care for them have contracted the virus.

“Even before the pandemic, residential care homes were a setting stretched far too thin,” says Dr. Sienna Caspar, an associate professor in the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Faculty of Health Sciences’ Therapeutic Recreation program. “Individuals who live in long-term care homes are vulnerable and these are not resource-rich environments.”

Over the past 20 years that Caspar has spent working in or consulting to long-term care facilities and conducting research, she has developed a culture-change model — the Feasible and Sustainable Culture Change Initiative (FASCCI) — to support person-centred care. Knowing these facilities have limited budgets, Caspar wanted to create a model that could be easily implemented by staff without requiring exorbitant amounts of extra resources.

The model has been tested in residential care settings in Alberta and led to more positive change than Caspar imagined possible. Now she’s poised to make it widely available in an online format, thanks to $25,000 in funding from the College of Licensed Practical Nurses of Alberta (CLPNA).

Several research studies were done to examine the effectiveness of the model. One study at a secure unit within a larger long-term care facility focused on creating change at meal times. Typically, residents had little to no choice about food and beverages and meals were served on trays. Residents didn’t participate in preparation or cleanup and often wouldn’t sit down to eat.

“Within three weeks of the staff engaging in this practice-change model, the trays were removed, residents were given more choices in their food and full choice of beverage,” says Caspar. “Residents started helping set tables and cleaning up, more sat down to finish their meals and remained at the table afterward to socialize.”

The staff went even further. Care aides sat down with residents for part of the meal and socialized with them. Then they introduced theme nights and family members got more involved.

“In addition to getting to know the residents better because they were communicating with them during meal time, the residents got to know the care aides as people, too,” says Caspar. “We actually had one care aide who teared up and said ‘I felt I was no longer being treated as a servant, but as a person.’ We even had care aides come in on their own time to take part in the weekly meetings.”

Thanks to earlier funding from the CLPNA, Caspar conducted the same study at a different residential care home and the results were the same.

Caspar then teamed up with Dr. Shannon Spenceley, an associate professor of nursing and associate dean in the Faculty of Health Sciences, who researches moral distress in dementia care settings. Her research has found that what causes moral distress for the care staff is their inability to provide the type of care they want to, typically because of constraints within the context of care. In Spenceley’s most recent study, Caspar led the intervention phase of the study, where the team used Caspar’s model to help care aides choose an area they wanted to change, and gave the team the tools they needed to develop and implement that change.

“The results blew us away,” says Caspar. “Care teams from other units within the facilities heard about what was happening and they wanted to be a part of it. To have workers in health-care settings actually pull change toward them was a unique experience, as opposed to resisting change because it causes stress.”

Caspar will spend the summer putting the model into a web-based platform and then test it out, hopefully in the fall.

“I have three long-term care organizations that are on board to use the website. We’ll observe whether or not it’s working and we’ll learn from them as they give us feedback,” says Caspar.

Eventually, Caspar hopes to make the model available to organizations for little or no cost.

UNews - Sienna Caspar

Person-centred care for Alberta’s aging population the focus of upcoming PUBlic Professor Series talk

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