How a Canadian Personal Support Worker Uses CPI Training to Increase Home Visit Safety

One day Walter Comer woke up to find that the factory he had worked in for 30 years was no longer in business. So, a challenge was thrust upon him—how to reinvent himself at 50 years old? To make a new start, Walter looked to his past. His mother was a home care aide known as a personal support worker, or PSW, and his sister is a nurse. So, according to Walt, caregiving is in his blood. 

He enrolled at Medix College in Brantford, Ontario after securing admission by passing an aptitude test for the PSW course. The first thing he noticed was that he was the oldest student in class, and in fact he even had a couple years on the teacher. After some initial trepidation, it was evident to Walt he was in the right place. “By the end of the first week, I knew in my heart that it was the right move, and it’s just excelled since then,” he says. It was at Medix that Walt was first received CPI’s Nonviolent Crisis Intervention^® training, a program that included skills that would prove to be remarkably helpful during home visits.

How the Victorian Order of Nurses Provides Invaluable Home Care

Personal support workers are employed through a nonprofit organization called the Victorian Order of Nurses, or VON. Today, the VON is one of the largest personal care services in the world, with forty regional sites, 6,400 healthcare workers across the eastern provinces and over 6,200 community volunteers across Ontario and Nova Scotia. The VON has been pioneering care at home for over 120 years. They are a trusted resource that works with clients, employees, volunteers, and partners to provide innovative clinical, personal, and social support through home visits to people who want the comfort and peace of mind of living in their own homes and communities.

PSWs provide help for Canadian families in a variety of ways. Maybe a person living with Alzheimer’s/dementia needs looking after in the home. A PSW will be there. Maybe a family has a child on the spectrum who requires special attention. A PSW will be there. Maybe a caregiver needs respite to avoid burnout. A PSW will be there. For these and many other scenarios where a support worker is needed for home visits, the Canadian government has provided a program whereby people and families in need have the security of knowing a capable, caring PSW will be at their door to help them when they’re in need. Because of the challenging behavior they often encounter, home visit safety is of paramount importance to PSWs.

In the Home Alone—and Prepared to Ensure Home Visit Safety

One constant in all the scenarios that PSWs face is that they are in the home alone, without backup from other government personnel. Walt identifies this reality of home visits as the primary reason CPI training is essential: “We are there to support the client themselves and we do everything from like I said, autistic children, we do mental patients that are having mental breakdowns. So, we help them and support them and that's why CPI is very important to us because we go into homes and we are alone. We are literally alone. We can be alone with a client that's not in his right mind and decides to grab a hold of you or take a cane to you or whatever the case may be. So, the course that I teach with CPI of course is a course that is very important to us because it helps us protect our nurses and protect our PSWs, so they don’t get hurt on the job.”

Walt finds both the verbal and physical skills taught in CPI training to be essential skills for PSWs on home visits. “If somebody grabs a hold of us, we have to be able to protect ourselves so that we can either get away to call 911 or we get away to call the loved one,” say Walt. But he makes it clear that verbal de-escalation is also essential: “I really, really push, push, push the verbal de-escalation because if you can calm somebody down without them grabbing a hold of you then nobody gets hurt,” explains Walt.

CPI Training at Medix—and Beyond

At Medix college, Walt has a variety of training courses. In addition to GPA, or Gentle Persuasive Approach, Walt was received CPI’s Nonviolent Crisis Intervention^® Training. According to Walt, “When I got taught CPI, it stuck with me because it’s a self-defense course that works—physically and mentally, it works.”
In fact, Walt found CPI training so effective and useful in his work as a PSW that he concluded that other VON workers should also receive it. His supervisor agreed, and in 2017 Walter became a CPI Certified Instructor. Since then he has gone on to train over 200 VON employees, ranging from other PSWs, to nurses, to managers. And he has been a persuasive advocate for the spread of CPI training to other regions serviced by the VON.

Walt began training PSWs in Haldimand, Norfolk, and because of his success there, he was approached by the VON management team and asked to train nurses in Hamilton, Ontario. From there, management decided to spread CPI training across Ontario, Quebec, and as far as Nova Scotia. According to Walt, “CPI (training) is so versatile in what we do and how we do our work that this course is being pushed out all the way to Nova Scotia now and covering every branch of the VON that we can cover.”

In my interview with Walt, you’ll learn:

• A few key facts about the remarkable history of the Victorian Order of Nurses (2:45)
• The essential role that Canada’s personal support workers (PSWs) play in helping to maintain public health (9:58)
• Why CPI physical skills are critical to PSWs (13:24)
• How a student of Walt’s used CPI physical and verbal skills to avoid injury when a client put her in a hold (14:09)
• How Walt’s belief in and capability facilitating CPI training has helped it spread through Canada via the VON (16:43)
• Why Walt finds CPI’s Verbal Intervention™ Training indispensable and “fantastic” (19:30)
• Why Walt loves the work he does now and how it is the culmination of his identity (21:30)

“CPI is a course that is very important to us because it helps us protect our nurses and protect our PSWs, so they don’t get hurt on the job.” — Walter Comer