The NDIS currently estimates that there are around 190,000 people with a disability in living in out of home care. As speech pathologists we frequently observe that these clients benefit greatly from making modifications to the contexts of their daily communication – in short, creating a supportive language environment.

This may include introducing visual supports, coaching staff on verbal and non-verbal communication and providing client-specific expertise. The barriers to the success of these measures include: lack of accessible resources on frequently-discussed topics, frequent changes in staff and difficulties accessing all staff for training.

This presentation outlines our process for developing reproducible coaching resources for staff in out of home care to creating supportive communication environments. We will also have implemented training with pre- and post data to capture the effectiveness of the resources in changing the communication environments of the trained support workers.

Our methods involved reviewing current best practices to support adults with cognitive disabilities to have a voice in their day to day care. We then translated those best practices into accessible resources for training and uptake by support workers. We are in the process of implementing training in out of home care environments.

In presenting our method and results we seek to add insight to the impact of general communication training on support worker confidence, and the change in communication environments. We will also discuss the barriers to providing effective training to a team of staff involved in the daily lives of adults with communication disabilities living in out of home care.

1. The factors to consider when designing training resources for support workers
2. The effective implementation of communication environment training for support workers
3. The impact of one off training and resource provision on the communication environments of supported living accommodation