The Selwyn Foundation is one of New Zealand’s leading providers of aged residential care and community support for older people. Guided by a strong service ethos, Selwyn is committed to providing excellent, compassionate care, and that commitment extends to ensuring their people are genuinely equipped to deliver it.
Optimism has demonstrated a clear ability to understand our brief and translate it into practical, effective learning modules. You have been highly responsive to our needs, consistently adapting to feedback, and ensuring that the final modules aligned with our expectations.
We greatly appreciate your professionalism, flexibility, and commitment to delivering high-quality outcomes. I would not hesitate to recommend your services to any organization looking for tailored, impactful learning solutions.
Director, Care Operations
Aged care is a high-stakes environment. The people delivering care are often time-poor, working across shifts, and juggling the demands of hands-on care. Keeping clinical knowledge current is not optional, but pulling staff away from the floor for lengthy training is rarely practical.
Selwyn already had strong clinical expertise and a well-established Canvas LMS in place. What they needed was a training programme that could meet their workforce where they were: role-specific, accessible, genuinely engaging, and built to the standard their residents deserve.
The challenge was not just building good modules. It was crafting a coherent, scalable training framework that could grow with the organisation, spanning two distinct roles (Care Partner and Registered Nurses) across a wide range of clinical and care topics.
Optimism partnered with Selwyn in early 2025, beginning with the foundations before building upward.
We started by establishing the Aged Care Training Framework, mapping the full landscape of learning needs across both Care Partner and RN roles.
This gave Selwyn a clear picture of what needed to be built, and a principled basis for prioritising it. The framework now covers topics from Falls and Wound Care to Palliative Care, Dementia, Cultural Safety, and beyond.
Rather than attempting to build everything at once, Selwyn and Optimism agreed on a phased approach, tackling priority topics first and building from there.
This allowed the programme to deliver value quickly while keeping the development process manageable for Selwyn’s team. It also meant learnings from Phase 1 could directly shape how Phase 2 was delivered.
Phase 1 delivered four modules: Assessing Pain for Care Partners, Assessing Pain for RNs, Preventing Falls, and Managing Falls. Each module was built around showing rather than telling, using engaging scenarios that put learners in realistic care situations, supported by interactive content, storytelling, Selwyn-specific media, and narration.
Keeping the two roles separate was a deliberate design decision. Combined modules may seem efficient on paper, but they create role confusion and content overwhelm, particularly for Care Partners. Each module speaks directly to the person doing the job.
Following the success of Phase 1, Selwyn commissioned a further seven modules covering Wound Care, Palliative and End of Life, Nutrition and Hydration, and Pain Management. The relationship is ongoing.
Phase 2 used a streamlined process that maintained the same interactive standard as Phase 1, with a more efficient consultation and development approach built on the strong working relationship already established.
As a result Selwyn has:
Really appreciate everything you have done and I know going forward, the staff will really enjoy this type of learning – THANK YOU 😊
Director of Care
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