Re-envisioning Care Virtually within the Community

By Care Corner Seniors Services

The COVID-19 crisis has certainly challenged CareCorner to rethink and reinvent our ways of co-learning with our carers, who are mainly seniors living in the community caring for their neighbours. Launched in 2018 by the TTSH Centre for Health Activation (CHA), the CHArge Up! Learning Programme aims to equip carers with the health skills, knowledge and confidence to care for themselves and for the residents living in our community. CareCorner selected chronic disease management as its first CHArge Up! module as this empowers healthy seniors to take an active step in disease prevention and seniors with chronic diseases to better manage care for themselves. We hope that this motivates seniors to embrace their own active ageing journey and encourage their friends in the community to join them.

However, COVID-19 struck before we could conduct our first training. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, we embraced a new rhythm and way of sharing information. The team worked closely with CHA to leverage on technology to launch a virtual CHArge Up! Learning Programme. This new approach looks at utilising a hybrid training model, combining online content delivery and short in-person assessment, to effectively and efficiently deliver training to our carers in these unprecedented times. A virtual programme encourages seniors to move together with digitalisation trends, become more accepting to new changes, confident to access information in a new digital world and eventually more empowered to care for others.

COVID-19 has given us an opportunity to explore new avenues to reach out to our carers to provide better care for our centre residents. Through virtual means, it paves a way for us to bring training to our carers' fingertips, keep our carers engaged during this pandemic and to better enable us to bring care to every corner in Singapore.

Through COVID-19, it has given us an opportunity to explore new avenues to reach out to our carers to provide better care for our centre residents. Through virtual means, it paves a way for us to bring training to our carers' fingertips, keep our carers engaged during this pandemic and to better enable us to bring care to every corner in Singapore.