Personal Caregiver Certificate Curriculum

Succeed by learning how to use your Penn Foster program. This course gives an introduction to health care, the health care industry, and the roles that health care workers play in that industry.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:

• Identify skills needed to be a confident and independent online learner
• Describe the United States healthcare industry and the professional roles within it learner.

This course discusses the importance of human interaction, including verbal and nonverbal communication, the communication feedback loop, barriers, cultural competence, and effective communication techniques. Applying communication skills to assist in caring for others will be addressed. Therapeutic communication skills and unique practices involved with caring for special populations will be covered. This course also introduces basic medical definitions and abbreviations, including word analysis, word usage, roots, prefix and suffix, with an emphasis placed on spelling and constructing medical terms. Students will be given an introduction to the positional and directional terms used to describe the human body.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:

• Summarize the elements of interpersonal communication
• Identify the best practices for communicating with patients
• Define medical terms and regions and structures of the body by analyzing medical terms

In this course, you'll learn how law affects healthcare practitioners, the origin of law that affects medical professionals, the basics of the process of litigation and its alternatives, the common-law basis for the confidentiality of healthcare information, and the laws regulating healthcare information collected and maintained by government agencies.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:

• Interpret civil and criminal laws related to healthcare
• Assess ethical issues healthcare professional face today
• Analyze confidentiality laws and regulations

This course is designed to train you in providing personal care to patients to meet their physical, psychological, and mental needs. You’ll develop homemaking and organizational skills as well as a working knowledge of IADLs. You’ll learn to apply standard practices and safety procedures. The course demonstrates how to take vital signs. You’ll learn to perform a basic health assessment with concentration on observing patients for condition changes. This course discusses basic infection control and prevention strategies, with emphasis on handwashing and bag technique. You’ll explore how to prevent spread of infection as well as special precautions. The course also demonstrates safety precautions and procedures for maintaining a clean and safe environment for the worker (aide), for patients in the home, at outside locations, and while transporting, along with proper body mechanics.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:

• Explain the procedures for maintaining a safe and healthy environment for both clients and yourself
• Identify personal care tasks, including the steps involved in bedmaking and elimination care
• Describe specimen collection and assessment procedures and other special procedures needed for client care

This course provides an overview of various dimensions of aging, including the aging process and how to provide competent care to the aging patient. It explores normal biological aging, attitudes toward aging, myths of aging, and how to monitor and assess for changes in psychosocial and functional status. It teaches how to develop an instructional plan for families to effectively manage physiologic and/or psychosocial changes. It also discusses end of life issues. Finally, it covers how to identify and handle emergency situations.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:

• Describe human needs and considerations and the documentation required when meeting those needs for
  clients
• Explain how to care for clients at any stage of life
• 描述类型的特殊客户需求紧急情况situations, and emergency situation procedures