About Bridge-The-Gap
The “Bridging the Gap Collaborative” (BTGC) was funded in March 2010 by the Ontario Trillium Foundation to develop online training for hospice volunteers in Ontario.
The BTGC project team:
Doane House Hospice - Lead, George Brown College, Hospice Association of Ontario, Palcare Network, Virtual Health Community, 12th Street Productions
are building a single prototype online module (one of twelve in the text-based Hospice Association of Ontario (HAO) accredited manual) with the entire process documented, to be shared.
Through this process the team have engaged a wide variety of interested parties,http://www.virtualhealthcampus.ca/groups/aboutbridgethegap/wiki/df94b/process_the_team.html
Best practices dictate that hospice volunteers require a minimum of thirty hours of classroom training. This time commitment and other barriers of travel, inflexibility of time and place of training sessions, inability to attend all sessions in a series (as required by accreditation) and the lack of immediate opportunity to engage volunteers, results in the loss of many qualified volunteers.
The availability of high quality, trained volunteers is integral to the Ontario hospice sector’s ability to meet the growing demand for hospice services.
Distance education principles are the basis of the proposed training program and, combined with the availability of technical expertise from the project partners, make it possible to “bridge the gap” between the knowledge holders in hospice and the people in communities across Ontario who volunteer to care for their neighbours. Providing training 24/7 will increase the capacity of hospices to provide service to their local community by increasing the availability of quality trained volunteers.
The target audience for this hospice volunteer training project is compassionate adults, interested in helping neighbours coping with a life threatening illness or the death of a loved one who have a minimum of four hours a week available to volunteer. The potential volunteer would have computer access and a basic awareness of internet navigation
The BTGC template module utilized the original text document from HAO, supplemented with multi-media content collected from hospice experts across Ontario and edited from a distance using wikis and blogs.
It will be tested and evaluated by hospice staff and volunteers and then made available for all Ontario hospice Coordinators of Volunteers to augment the required thirty hour training, through which all volunteers must go prior to working with hospice clients.
Recommendations for hardware, software and internet capabilities suitable for managing such a project will be made by industry experts. In addition, the cost of subsequent modules will be estimated so that future potential funders may be approached for the completion of the entire HAO manual.
The content management system template, built using Drupal technology, will be available for other agencies in the health and social service sector to populate with their own content. The instruction manuals and “lessons learned” will also be shared with other agencies wanting to use the wikis and blogs to collaboratively collect, edit and “publish” their sector-specific knowledge online.
The prototype and the technology used for collaborative content developemnt will be shared at a Symposium at George Brown College on April 4, 2011. For further details on the symposium contact:
jpearce@evergreenhospice.org or
jirish@doanehospice.org
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