Date: 2007-02-08
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Home carers who speak their clients’ ethnic language will help make services more culturally friendly, Community Services Minister Gavin Jennings said today. Presenting certificates to 25 aged care graduates speaking a total of 23 community languages, Mr Jennings said home and community care (HACC) services need to be responsive to our culturally diverse community. “As people age and grow frail, they seek comfort from what is familiar, such as their own languages,” Mr Jennings said.
(Media-Newswire.com) - Home carers who speak their clients’ ethnic language will help make services more culturally friendly, Community Services Minister Gavin Jennings said today.
Presenting certificates to 25 aged care graduates speaking a total of 23 community languages, Mr Jennings said home and community care (HACC) services need to be responsive to our culturally diverse community.
“As people age and grow frail, they seek comfort from what is familiar, such as their own languages,” Mr Jennings said.
“One in five Victorians speak a language other than English at home, using 180 different languages and dialects. Within four years, so will nearly one in four senior Australians.
For home carers, speaking the language of the people you are supporting can be one way of providing more culturally responsive care.”
Melbourne’s northern suburbs have high and growing proportions of seniors born overseas, with two in three Whittlesea residents aged 65 and over being from a migrant background.
Half of all the over-65s in Moreland, Yarra and Darebin, and four in 10 living in Hume are migrants.
A short film shown at the presentation, Like My Own Family: Care, Culture and Language for Older Migrants highlighted the need for aged carers with second languages by taking viewers into the homes of five frail older migrant families with Turkish, Vietnamese, Assyrian, Somali and Greek backgrounds.
The Northern Migrant Resource Centre produced the film and developed the Certificate III in Aged Care training program in partnership with the Northern Metropolitan Institute of TAFE.
The Centre received $52,000 through the Bracks Government’s $8.4 million Culturally Equitable Gateways Strategy for multicultural workforce development and improved staff recruitment and retention.
Mr Jennings thanked the agencies for offering a course to better equip multicultural home support workers to provide HACC services to frail seniors from ethnic backgrounds.
Today’s intake of home support and Planned Activity Group workers at Preston Town Hall today follows the Centre’s first 36 graduates in 2005.
HACC services, which help older people and others with disabilities to continue living at home, are delivered through 500 local councils, health services and non-government agencies statewide.