• Long-Term Care Orientation Co-operative

    The Long-Term Care Orientation Co-operative is an innovative collaboration between Lambton College and regional long-term care homes. The Co-operative supports essential Human Resources functions related to onboarding and on-going training of administrators, staff, and volunteers.

    The Co-operative provides training tailored to individual homes’ needs and HR policies, and brings tracking, record-keeping and compliance auditing together in one place. The Co-operative also enables staff mobility by providing a one-stop portable digital passport to verify employees’ and volunteers’ credentials and competencies.

  • What Does the Co-operative Do?

    When long-term care homes hire a new staff member, they are relying on that person’s previous education and experiences to have provided them with the skills necessary to meet the global requirements for the job. Each individual home seeks to ensure that the standard of training and orientation is met for all new and existing staff, often on a redundant basis. The Co-operative fills in several key gaps in this scenario by doing the following:

    • Deriving consensus for any training that is required for all long-term care homes in order to establish a unified standard aligned to governing bodies

    • Providing home-specific add-ons for any requirements not covered by standardized training

    • Recognizing external training equivalents by mapping training from other sources

    • Ensuring the currency of staff training and certification by sending reminders to organizations and staff when new training is required

    • Centralizing the updating of curriculum to align with changes in legislation or accepted best practice

    • Reducing redundant verification of individual qualifications when staff move between employers within the sector

    This first-of-its-kind standardized training certification program delivers an all-in-one digital passport attesting to external certifications, sector-specific orientation and onboarding module completion, and institutional and role-specific competencies.

  • The Co-operative Portal Model

    The Co-operative's trackable and stackable, sector-standardized micro-credentials address the orientation, competency auditing, training and upskilling needs of long-term card homes in the Sarnia-Lambton region, enabling easier recruitment and staff mobility.

    The project leverages Lambton College’s elearning capabilities, technology infrastructure, and existing micro-credential programming in Personal Support Worker and Food Service Worker to create a collaboratively led portal that enables healthcare organizations to more efficiently track and train new and existing staff.

    The Co-operative’s portal centralizes information about individuals’ credentials and competencies related to general and role-specific requirements. This enables organizations to eliminate redundant orientation and other training by verifying each individual’s competencies against standards recognized across the regional homes. The portal also monitors deadlines for any training that must be renewed and sends timely reminders to both employers and employees to ensure training deadlines are met.

    The result is a centralized audit trail of staff qualifications and professional development; and the capacity to decrease the onboarding and orientation burden of a highly mobile staff workforce.

    Food Service Worker

  • Costs

    Under the proposed co-operative model, the member organizations will support the basic functions of the Long-Term Care Orientation Co-operative through membership fees.

    The centralized orientation training is priced as a package that covers the delivery of 8 hours of self-paced, on-demand training, verification of competencies, and confirmation of qualifications. The verified competencies and qualifications will be reflected in each individual’s digital passport.

    Micro-credentials will be available to the regional long-term care homes under a per use model. The pricing of the individual organization-specific add-on micro-credentials will be dependent upon factors such as market value, number of instructional hours, and delivery costs.

    woman using computer

  • Project Status and Goals

    Development of the Long-Term Care Orientation Co-operative has been funded via the initial phase of the Ontario Micro-credential challenge fund.

    Stakeholders have been engaged to determine the necessary content for both universal and home-specific training.

    A guiding checklist comprised of topics, subjects, time units, and audience has been created and is now being used by the innovation team to develop competency-focused micro-credentials in the virtual learning platform. In-person training is also being planned under a “bootcamp” model. The project is on-track to pilot with long-term care homes in Sarnia-Lambton in April 2022.

    With a successful pilot, the project will be scaled up to support the Retirement Home and Hospital sectors. The goal is to expand the Co-operative to other regions in the province to help lessen staff shortages and costly on-boarding procedures.

    food prepartion

  • Get Involved

    If you are interested in participating in the development of the co-operative model, or being involved in the expansion phase of the Long-Term Care Orientation Co-operative, please contact LTC.cooperative@lambtoncollege.ca.



    Research and Innovation Lambton College - Vision Nursing and Rest Home 74 Inc

    This project is a joint collaboration between Lambton College, Vision’74 Inc., and the LTC Facilities Operators Group of Sarnia Lambton.

    The project is funded by the Province of Ontario through the Micro-credential Challenge Fund.