Sandwiched but Strong - sort of

Last night I had a dream. I was all alone in the house, fixing myself dinner and picking up after the kids. No big deal, just relaxing and enjoying an evening alone.

All of a sudden, a mass of bad guys began breaking in – coming in through windows and doors, on both floors, all at the same time. The bad guys were breaking apart handrails and furniture, pulling out any metal pieces (thanks, media folks, for those story on druggies stealing metals for drug money…).

I’m tackling the bad guys right and left and then – the phone rings.

I stop what I’m doing, pick up the phone, and it’s my mom.

“Hi mom,” I say.

“Hi.” She replies. “I just wanted to talk with you about some things,” she says with a quiver in her voice.

“I’ll call you back a little later, Mom, OK?” I say, and hang up the phone to go back to fighting the bad guys.

About then I woke up and thought, “Wow, if that doesn’t exactly express how the person stuck in that ‘sandwich generation’ feels!”

It’s not like the visual of nice comfort food between two yummy slices of bread.

It’s more like beating off the “bad guys” (work, kid worries, money – you probably have your own list) on the one hand, and pausing – just for a second – to be there for the parent, knowing that you’ve got to get back to those pressing issues – NOW – but your parent still needs you…and so it goes.

My favorite part of the dream was the fact that I, single-handedly, fought off all the bad guys.

It was probably because of the one little thing I forgot to mention – the red “Supermom” cape I happened to be wearing that evening.

Know where I can order one in real life?

e-Training Making a Difference in Senior Care

Last week we had a visit from a person who works in a state office on education. He's got a PhD, and specializes in distance education.

I admit it - I was nervous when I began showing him samples of our online courses, both on our website EasyCEU (for licensed nursing home and assisted living administrators, nurses, social workers and other licensed senior care professionals) and on our aQuire Training Solutions website. We showed him samples of all the ways we've built and designed courses to be delivered online.

Our newest course - the one we're most proud of - is the online nursing assistant course. We've just submitted it for approval, and hope to launch it in the state of Oregon within a month or so.

At the end of the presentation we sat back and waited to hear this expert's opinion. We're not distance learning experts, after all (at least we certainly weren't when we began this journey). We're just passionate about training the next generation of individuals who will care for seniors.

We're passionate in a professional way, meaning we've invested millions of hours and dollars into trying to discover the most effective, efficient ways to train new caregivers.

We're passionate in a personal way, too, since we realize that the people receiving the care are our parents, grandparents - one day (in the rapidly approaching future) ourselves.

We believe we're making a difference. We think, maybe a bit too boldly, that our newest nursing assistant course can contribute to a genuine culture change in the way care is provided in the state of Oregon.

There was a moment of silence, and then the expert commented, "I'm tremendously impressed. Your courses are visually interesting, highly interactive and rich in content. You're doing something that absolutely no one else is doing in this area right now. It will make a difference."

It's an incredibly gratifying way to end the week, believing that what you are doing DOES make a difference in senior care today, and will make a difference in the future, too.

It's exciting, too, because we've only just started out on this journey!

The Ethics of Truth

The past couple of weeks have been ones in which truth-telling has taken a bath. One of my personal “good guys,” Eliot Spitzer, was found – well, you know where.

And while my local newspaper endorsed Barak Obama in large black editorial typeface, my periodical of choice, Time Magazine, ran its own editorial about why newspapers should never write an endorsement of a candidate (makes them look less objective, was the reasoning).

Then in this week’s Time, a columnist shared his day’s tasks: run, eat, drop off kids, vote for Barak.

It makes me think about an issue of ethics that I’ve believed in for some time: transparency.

I remember precious little else from my undergraduate education, but this one bit of extemporaneous advice from a professor stuck with me and rang true: as people setting ourselves up to help and guide other people, the most honest thing we should do is post, for everyone to see, our own personal guiding beliefs. Then, people who chose to accept our help would know what they were getting into.

It rang true to me then, and it rings true to me today. What guides me, as a person, will deeply affect the advice and assistance I give you.

As an educator, dedicating this phase of my career to training the next generation of senior care providers, my personal beliefs profoundly affect how I craft the learning experience.

My staff has been immersed in the creation of the first online course to train Certified Nursing Assistants in the state of Oregon, a project jointly sponsored by my company, aQuire Training Solutions, and the Oregon Health Care Association.

Part of what every nursing assistant must know to pass the state exam is a set of procedures for providing specific care tasks to individuals; things like transferring from bed to wheelchair, and assisting with a shower.

The state posts these procedures, step by 101-step, on their website. Instructors must teach the steps exactly as the state sets out.

As we were creating learning activities to help students learn these steps easier I felt myself getting more and more agitated – couldn’t figure out why, until I realized – and shouted, “These steps sound like we’re moving pieces of furniture!”

We’re teaching students the steps, but we’re adding in, for every step, a sample quote of what the student might say to the individual as the step is being taken.

We’re not caring for pieces of furniture. We’re caring for individuals – with losses, with needs, with real human lives.

My own beliefs show through in every aspect of this course. I think that the course will be better for it – but that’s for you to judge. My beliefs are pretty much out there for everyone to see…

Watch the movie…you’ll get it!