Analyse der von den polnischen Betreuerinnen für die häusliche Altenpflege in Deutschland benötigten kommunikativen Kompetenzen

Home care for the elderly in Germany is mainly carried out by migrant female personal assistants, who are not professionally prepared, neither linguistically nor in caring methods. The important role of successful communication in elderly care raises the question of how the care workers can handle different communicative requirements encountered in their daily professional duties. This thesis investigates different aspects of communication between the Polish live-in caregivers and the German persons needing care and their relatives and pays particular attention to the communicative competence of the caregivers. The focus on elderly care assistants with a Polish background is due to the fact that they are a strongly represented group in the live-in home care in Germany and based on the observation of this phenomenon and of its presence in the social discourse in Germany and in Poland. This work aims to address the question of how Polish live-in caregivers can be adequately prepared to communicate efficiently in their work. To better characterize the communication in the home care, this dissertation explores a wide range of communicative situations. The primary purpose of this study is to identify and describe various communicative situations and to consider the challenges that each poses for the Polish care assistants. The final aim was to develop a plan for the linguistic and communicative preparation of home care assistants. This plan should be empirically grounded, sensitive to the employment and living conditions of live-in caregivers, consider their preferences and opportunities to learn a foreign language, and should focus on the communicative situations in which the Polish caregiver find more challenges and wish to be better prepared. The study also tried to answer the question of which educational offer would be more suitable for this particular professional group.