OASIS Alert

If your staff members' eyes glaze over during OASIS training, it's time for you to shake up the old routine and don't be afraid of some good, old-fashioned silliness.

To keep things interesting, Susan Beckner, OASIS / PPS Educator for Sharp Home Health in San Diego, CA, has been known to don cow bells, gypsy costumes and hula hoops during staff meetings. And staffers are far more receptive to the fun and entertaining lessons that ensue than they are to traditional classroom-type educational sessions, she tells Eli.

Beckner presents OASIS lessons in the form of skits designed to make the learning fun. "In my first skit I wore a cow bandana and had a large cow bell around my neck. The goal was to review important M0 (MOOOO) questions," she relates.

Sharp also held an OASIS skills fair focusing on the activities of daily living, IADL and behavioral questions. "Each station had a scenario that included a script to include the M0 questions [staffers] needed to cover," Beckner explains. Re-hab staff members demonstrated appropriate assessment techniques, while psych nurses addressed the behavioral items, she says.

When it comes time to talk about significant changes in condition, Beckner does her gypsy skit. Dressed in full gypsy regalia, she uses an 8-ball as a crystal ball and a set of Old Maid cards as Tarot cards. "The 8-ball was to 'predict' the significant changes. The cards gave examples of SCICs. The 8-ball told which OASIS form to complete and corresponding information," Beckner reports.

Looking for an entertaining way to educate staff on LUPAs? Pull out the hula hoops. Beckner's LUPA skit involves dressing in 50's clothing, taping HIPPS codes to clinicians' hips and hula hooping to "Midnight at the OASIS." "The rationale for the skit was comparing the difficulty of hula hooping to the difficulty of providing accurate assessments, with adequate utilization patterns while providing quality care. Both take a lot of practice," Beckner quips.

If sketch comedy isn't your cup of tea, regular OASIS reminders are another good way to keep staffers on their toes. Mary Newberry, director of Riverside Home Health in Kankakee, IL, keeps an OASIS bulletin board that features a new topic every few months. She takes a "read and eat" approach, affixing candies to the board to attract staffers to read it, she says.

Friendly competition is another way to keep clinicians interested in OASIS accuracy. At Sharp, staffers completed a self-learning module filled with OASIS-related questions.

Beckner then compiled the questions that clinicians had the most trouble with and held a "scholar bowl." She divided clinicians into teams who competed against each other. The winners received movie tickets.

"I dressed in my daughter's cap and gown and had an assistant who judged [which team] rang their bell first. It became quite a competition," she says. Staffers not competing served as the audience, and Beckner provided them with the correct answers to the questions being asked.

While most people never will rank completing OASIS as one of their top-three fun activities, OASIS training doesn't have to be drudgery. "I try to make a confusing, time-consuming but helpful assessment fun," Beckner concludes.