Maximize Your Potential With A Caregiver Certification

Whether you’re a family caregiver or a paid professional like a personal care aide, you’re familiar with the never-ending “to-do” list. While the needs of a child with special needs may differ significantly from patients with dementia, the impact can feel the same for a caregiver. 

Depending on your role or profession, you might help with tasks like:

• Preparing food or feeding
• Cleaning wounds
• Helping them with exercise
• Running errands

• Personal care tasks and activities of daily living, like dressing or bathing
• Helping with organizing or administering medications 
• Helping them transfer out of bed or move around the home
• Cleaning the home
• Driving to appointments

It’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture when all you see in front of you is a hefty checklist. However, caregiving is about more than just completing a laundry list of tasks–it’s about making an impact on someone’s life. On a daily basis, your care recipient relies on you to help with a whole host of responsibilities that they need support with. These responsibilities are ones that you, as a caregiver, have the necessary skills and abilities to perform. But how can you be sure that you’re maximizing your potential? 

Get Caregiving Inspiration

First, let’s think about what it truly means to maximize your potential. It might be helpful to grab a piece of paper and think about times you’ve received care from someone that felt high-quality or special. Ask yourself:

• Who was it from? A parent? A family caregiver? A healthcare professional? 
• What made their care stand out to you? You probably don’t remember every babysitter or nurse who provided care to you, so what was so special about this person? Did they make you feel heard or comforted during a scary time? Was it their excellent bedside manner? Did they always show up on time? 
• How do you think you can learn from them? Think about what you can do to bring aspects of their caregiving into your own practice.

While it can look different for every person, it’s likely that every caregiver who has maximized their potential has these traits in common: they go beyond basic practical skills and truly excel at what they do. Whether they go the extra mile by noting their care recipient’s favorite flavor of pudding or practice effective communication techniques in response to challenging behaviors, their care makes a lasting impact. 

5 Ways To Unlock Your Potential With A Caregiver Certification Course

A caregiver certification course is designed to train caregivers on a variety of health and care topics. The information in the course can meet the caregiver training needs of:

• New caregivers
• Experienced caregivers
• A family caregiver
• A professional caregiver in caregiver jobs like:
  • Personal Care Aide (PCA)
  • Home Health Aide (HHA)
  • Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA)

But how do you make the leap from an adequate caregiver to an excellent one? Let’s explore 5 ways that a caregiver certification course can help you maximize your potential. 

1. Helps Identify Knowledge Gaps

You may have heard the phrase, “You don’t know what you don’t know”. And while this can be true, it’s less than ideal when it’s referring to the care you provide to someone who relies on you. 

A caregiver certification course can help you understand where you excel and where there may be areas of caregiving that you can improve upon. A caregiver certification course covers a wide range of topics and opportunities to test your knowledge. Explore what you can learn from a caregiver certification course in this article. 

2. Reveals Untapped Potential & Explores Interests

Getting additional training by taking a caregiver certification course can help reveal untapped potential in many ways, including: 

• Learning about populations or care techniques you wouldn’t have otherwise known about, which can help you know where you want to focus your interests in continuing education. For example, senior care or dementia care. 
• Enhancing your resume and helping you stand out.
• Kickstarting your journey towards professional caregiving if you’re an informal caregiver.
• We help you respond to and manage complex care situations, such as first aid, emergencies, and health waste disposal, with the right tools and resources.
• Gaining confidence and competence in your caregiving skills, which can help you provide safer and more effective home care. It can also help you feel like a more qualified caregiver! 

3. Supports You To Become A More Holistic Caregiver

Holistic care involves addressing a person’s physical, social, emotional, and spiritual needs when providing them care, which can help them better manage health conditions and improve quality of life. If you think about it, a person’s illness or condition is never one-dimensional. There are usually several pieces working together. 

Taking a caregiver certification course can not only provide you with education on physical health care topics, but also various ways that will help you learn other important aspects of providing quality care that support your care recipient as a whole person. For example:

• Supporting someone with symptoms of mental illness
• Improving your communication skills
• Practicing trauma-informed care methods
• Responding to emergencies
• Offering support through end-of-life or palliative care

Ultimately, becoming a certified caregiver can support you to be a more well-rounded caregiver.

4. Enables You To Use Caregiving Time To The Fullest

Instead of taking a caregiver certification course in person, you can explore ones that offer training online. This allows you to squeeze in learning opportunities when it works for your schedule. You can enhance your impact by completing a module while in the waiting room at a doctor’s appointment, or taking a quiz while your care recipient takes their afternoon nap.

However, this doesn’t mean you need to spend every second learning something new about caregiving or quizzing yourself. In fact, taking time to rest is just as vital to caregiving as sharpening your skills. Caregiver burnout can be a serious consequence of caring, whether you’re a family caregiver or a paid professional. It can look like: 

• Fatigue
• Headaches or body aches
• Trouble sleeping
• Poor immune system
• Anxiety or depression 

5. Commits You To Continued Skill-Building & Lifelong Learning 

It’s rare that we encounter situations where we say, “I’m done. I’ve learned all I can about this subject!” Even experts in the field know that they never stop learning. Research is expanding and best practices are always being updated. The reality is that we’re always learning. 

A caregiver certification course can maximize your caregiving potential by helping you continue learning and building your skills to become the best caregiver you can be. 

The Path To Maximizing Your Caregiving Potential

Whether you want to maximize your potential as a paid professional or simply want to become a better family caregiver, a caregiver certification course is the next step on your caregiving journey. Ready to take the next step? Check if you have free access to Trualta’s caregiver training program and certification offerings. 

References

1. Jasemi, M., Valizadeh, L., Zamanzadeh, V., & Keogh, B. (2017). A Concept Analysis of Holistic Care by Hybrid Model. Indian journal of palliative care, 23(1), 71–80. https://doi.org/10.4103/0973-1075.197960 ion
2. https://www.aplaceformom.com/senior-living-data/articles/caregiver-burnout-statistics 
3. Reinhard SC, Given B, Petlick NH, et al. Supporting Family Caregivers in Providing Care. In: Hughes RG, editor. Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US); 2008 Apr. Chapter 14. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2665/