Welcome to my World

Bluebird Care Newmarket & Fenland, Cambridge & Cambridge South, Bedford, Huntingdon, and Wellingborough provide a ‘Welcome to my World’ training course which includes the use of an age simulation suit allowing care experts, friends & family members, and local professionals to understand the different conditions older people live with on a day-to-day basis.

Aims & Objectives:

Aims:

To provide an understanding of the daily challenges that are met by our customers and to educate people within the ‘circle of support’ of the many reasons why a person may not want to do something, may not want to go somewhere or may choose to make decisions that we feel are not the best

Objectives:

• For everyone to understand why the customer is making their decisions and how to overcome any barriers that may be faced.
• To increase the knowledge of different health conditions and ways in which we can make life easier for the customer.
• To immerse others into the world of people living with differing health conditions including the experience of living with Dementia.

The GERT Suit

The suit is comprised of weighted Velcro components that attach to the wearer's chest, arms, hands and legs. It also comes with a set of hearing loss-inducing headphones, a neck brace and a pair of goggles to simulate vision impairment. Other age-related impairments that the suit helps participants experience include opacity of the eye lens, narrowing of the visual field, head mobility restrictions and joint stiffness.

The aim of this course is to is to raise awareness and understanding of the challenges our customers can experience on a daily basis. Gert has many components which can be combined to simulate part or all of the following impairments:

• hemiparesis
• unsteady gait
• paralysis of one leg
• paralysis of one arm
• unilateral vision impairment
• unilateral hearing impairment
• speech and swallow disorders

Course content:

• Theory – Gaining knowledge of varying approaches to deal with differing situations that may arise, learning to approach the situation through their eyes and joining them in their world.
• Practical – The use of ‘Gert’, the care experience zone to identify and manage differing behaviours when completing care,

Course duration:

3 hours

Activities

For the practical part of the course we set up a number of simple day-to-day task to complete while the participant is wearing the GERT suit in our mock-customer environment.

These activities include:

• Sitting to standing position,
• Walking from one room to another,
• Folding laundry,
• Doing up buttons on a shirt,
• Putting on a pair of socks,
• Putting away washing up items,
• Making the bed
• Getting in and out of bed
• Administering their own medications
• Writing a shopping list
• And many other day-to-day activities.

Time to Reflect

Once each participant has completed the practical session. We then discuss the experience in a group and ask the following questions:

• How did it make you feel?
• What difficulties did you experience?
• Will the experience affect your approach to our customers?
• What additional activities could be included?

If you would like to find out more about our training programme please get in touch with our office support team.