Oral Health

Maintaining good oral hygiene is one of the most important factors when caring for older people, but also one of the most commonly overlooked. This is why our team at Altura Learning have created 2 specialist e-learning courses focused on how to improve oral care in your aged care organisation.

Why oral hygiene is important

Poor oral hygiene can have many negative impacts, especially on older people, and most common oral diseases are entirely preventable. Bad oral health can make it extremely painful to eat, drink, or take medication properly, which can have serious knock on effects.

Older people with poor dental hygiene can become malnourished, and are more at risk from certain diseases such as diabetes, intestinal problems, lung disease and heart disease. All these diseases are caused by a reduced intake of healthy foods due to mouth pain, and can all result in a lower life expectancy.

Not only are there severe physical effects, but there are also serious psychological impacts of poor oral care. These range from personal isolation due to embarrassment and discomfort from eating and speaking in social situations, to reduced cognitive functions linked with dental pain. This can be extremely damaging to older people who may already have impaired cognitions due to old age or dementia.

These impacts are the biggest contributing factor as to why it is vital for your aged care organisation to provide excellent oral hygiene training to your care staff, ensuring they provide not only exceptional levels of care, but a service that is delivered in line with the legal requirements for care in Australia.

Exceptional training for safe and effective care

Altura Learning’s oral hygiene courses support the delivery of care under standard 3 of the Aged Care Quality standards. This standard focuses on providing safe, effective personal and clinical care, that is person centred and optimises their health and wellbeing.

By choosing either our home or residential oral care course your care staff will become fully qualified on spotting the risk factors for oral diseases by understanding the consequences of poor oral health, implementing strategies to prevent poor oral hygiene and gaining the skills needed to correctly assist older people with cleaning their teeth and/or dentures.

The experience and expertise these courses will teach aged care staff provide them with the key qualities needed to provide professional, personalised care.

Is our Oral Hygiene course right for you?

We currently offer 2 oral hygiene courses, one aimed at organisations who work in a home care setting and one for workers in residential care environments. We’re experts in making specialised e-learning courses for aged care providers, working with a team of experienced dental health professionals to make sure our training videos are engaging, inspiring and successful in helping your care staff improve the quality of mouth care they deliver.

Whether you want to teach your care workers the basics of providing exceptional oral care or looking to bring their personalised care skills to the next level, our online training courses are for you.

Enquire online today to discover how we can help develop your workforce with a bespoke learning solution that works perfectly for you!