This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license .Cultural and linguistic diversity between residents and staff is significant in residential aged care homes in Australia. Residents are from over 170 countries with 31% born overseas and 20% born in a non-English speaking country (AIHW, 2016). Staff who care for residents are also from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. It is estimated that 32% of staff were born overseas and 26% were born in a non-English speaking country (Mavromaras et al., 2017). The majority of overseas-born residents come from Europe while the majority of overseas-born staff come from Asian and African regions (Mavromaras et al., 2017, AIHW, 2016). This diversity generates many opportunities for aged care organisations to address equitable and culturally appropriate care for residents. However, the diversity can also be a challenge to achieving high-quality care for residents and to staff cohesion.
The program is developed from a 2-year action research project entitled ‘Developing the multicultural workforce to improve the quality of care for residents’. The project is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the ‘Service Improvement and Healthy Ageing Grants’ in 2015. During the project life, the project team worked with residents and staff in four participating residential aged care homes to implement and evaluate the program. The details of the research project are presented in the project final report (Xiao et al., 2017). The program has been adapted into an online self-learning program using the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and is free to access. Instruction for accessing the online program is attached as Appendix 1: Instructions for accessing the online Cross-cultural Care Program for Aged Care Staff
