Begleitevaluation des „Bildungs- und Entwicklungsprojekt Kinästhetik“

Meanwhile, kinesthetics has become established, especially in German-speaking countries. The Samaritan Foundation, a large provider of inpatient long-term care facilities in Germany has set itself the objective of developing the kinesthetics competence of all nursing and care staff in its facilities. For this purpose, the provider launched the kinesthetics education and development project in 2019. This article aims to describe the process of the project (process evaluation) as well as the development of kinesthetics competence (summative evaluation). The staff’s kinesthetics competence was assessed at two points in time (T1 and T2) by means of a questionnaire and video data. For the process evaluation, interviews with management staff took place at both survey points in order to supplement the questionnaire survey with structured and open-ended questions about the educational project. During the T2 survey, focus group interviews with staff were carried out in the facilities.

Overall, the results indicate that the implementation of this pilot project was successful. Both managers and staff would like to further enhance kinesthetics competence in their facility; however, they consider the sustainable implementation to be a challenge and they reflect in many ways about possibilities to pursue these issues. The results suggest that in the future it would be helpful, for example, to enhance the involvement of care assistants as well as to “familiarize” with kinesthetics at an early stage and in a practical way (before the basic course) or to explicitly explain individual course objectives.