The vast majority of hands-on health care is not given by doctors or nurses, but rather by paraprofessional or informal caregivers. Across the U.S., an estimated 1.39 million certified nursing assistants, 1.5 million home care aides, and 24 million informal caregivers shoulder an increasing responsibility for providing basic care needed by ill and frail patients. Unfortunately, training resources for these caregivers are in many instances inadequate. One indication of the inadequacy of current caregiver training is evidenced by the low pass rate on the NNAAP Skills Evaluation for nursing assistant certification. Caregiver Basic Skills Training (C-BST) is an Internet or CD-ROM software system designed to teach caregivers the 25 basic care-giving skills included in the NNAAP Skills Evaluation. The software addresses the learning needs of caregivers from a facet-based learning perspective drawn from the cognitive science of how people learn. C-BST addresses the low literacy rate for caregivers through rigorous attention to content reading level, combining written text with graphics and video, and narration of text. Additionally, native-language narration of C-BST content serves as a bridge to content mastery for low English proficiency ESL learners.
The market for caregiver basic skills training is large, including nursing assistants, home care aides, informal caregivers, and entities that train them including long-term care, adult family homes, and boarding homes. Talaria is working with public agencies and private businesses in Washington State to develop marketing channels that can be implemented nation wide.
