Diversity training evaluation for community aged care: Tool development

Area of Science:

• Gerontology
• Healthcare Professional Development
• Sociology of Health

Background:

• Diverse characteristics like culture and sexual orientation can affect older adults' healthcare participation.
• Healthcare and aged care professionals require training to address these diversity impacts.
• Existing evaluation tools for diversity training in aged care are limited.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a survey instrument for assessing the impact of diversity training on health and aged care professionals.
• To measure changes in professionals' skills and attitudes towards serving older individuals with diverse characteristics.
• To identify limitations of the developed tool in capturing knowledge acquisition.

Main Methods:

• Adapted Delphi methodology was used to develop an initial pool of 31 survey items.
• Exploratory factor analysis reduced the items to 21, forming a two-factor solution (skills and attitudes).
• A survey was administered to 195 health and aged care professionals before and after diversity training, with data analyzed using t-tests.

Main Results:

• The survey demonstrated good internal consistency (Cronbach alpha = 0.78).
• Post-training scores for both skills and attitudes domains were significantly higher than pre-training scores.
• The survey method was less effective for assessing knowledge, suggesting alternative question formats are needed.

Conclusions:

• The developed survey tool is a valuable first step in evaluating diversity training outcomes in community aged care.
• The tool effectively measures improvements in healthcare professionals' skills and attitudes regarding diverse older populations.
• Further validation is required for broader application of the survey instrument in the aged care sector.