Translate content

The SOSU lesson is divided into 7 overall parts:

1. General conversation
2. Personal hygiene
3. Naming Body Parts
   
4. Bandaging Residents
5. Medicin & Medication
6. Lifting and moving residents
7. Palliative Care and Death

After these lessons you will be able to:

• Start a general conversation
• Name various body parts
• Talk about medication, bandaging & personal hygiene
• Talk about measuring blood sugar & lifting residents
• Talk about palliative care, death and dying

A SOSU helper provides professional care to people who cannot care for themselves. Professional means that the residents, their needs and stories, are the center of attention for what you do. You can share your own stories, but remember that the resident must be the center of attention.

You will typically work with older people at nursing homes, or perhaps visit and assist them in their own homes, if they are still able to reside there. 

Watch the video and try to follow the conversation. It uses many of the terms and phrases that you will be learning in this lesson. 

Lotte: Godmorgen Margot.

Margot: Godmorgen.

Lotte: Har du sovet godt?

Margot: Ja, ja.

Lotte: “I 1972 blev kronprinsesse Margrethe til Dronning Margrethe d. II af Danmark...hendes far……….."

An important aspect of your job is to converse with your residents and talk about their day, their schedule and life in general. 

In the introduction you have learned how to greet at different times of day with goddag, godmorgen, godaften and godnat. 

In the following, you can pick up some good conversation starters and information providers.

In the morning when you arrive to help a resident out of bed, you say godmorgen. 

You may hear the same back, and you can ask:

You might hear your resident ask for breakfast, or you can ask them:

Later on in the morning, or in the afternoon when you revisit the resident, there are other connversational topics you can use:

Food, including dinner, is mostly prepared in a central kitchen at the nursing home and served to the resident

You could also be asked if you have time to read a bit?

As a SOSU helper, there will be plenty of times where you have to assist your residents with their hygienic needs. Among these are going to the bathroom, bathing, showering, brushing their teeth, cleaning wounds and similar.

There are times when you will need to help you residents go to the toilet or change their diapers. 

In the picture you can see the names of various body parts, that you will need to learn. 

In the following pages you can hear them pronounced and practice saying them. 

Note: Click the image to enlarge it.

And, just a few more:

As part of your job, you will be required to be able to apply bandages to wounds and similar. In the following, you will learn vocabulary, questions and conversation relating to that.

In Danish a bandage is also known by the same word although pronounced slightly different. So, you can use it. 

But, more common is the term forbinding.

You can tell the resident what you are doing, or give instructions:

You can ask the resident if there is anything wrong, and what

There will be times when you have to assist a resident in getting somewhere, or have to help them entirely get where they have to go. But since you are not allowed to simply carry people, there are various aids that you can employ instead.

The ceiling lift runs on a series of tracks mounted in the ceiling. It can be used both to lift a resident from bed to chair, or vice versa, or up from the floor 

The floor lift is very versatile because it can be moved around freely and has lots of applications, such as moving residents from their bed to a chair, or up from the floor.

Death is not something Danes find easy to talk about. But Danes do tend to get fairly old, and the average age of living has only increased over the years. 

Today women generally live until they are 83 years old, and men until they are 79.

Historical point of view

A hundred years ago, death seems to have been a more natural part of life. Many people died at a younger age, and becoming old was deemed lucky. If you had 10 children, you were lucky if 3 of them reached adulthood. 

A lot of people died in wars or accidents. If you were ill, you were taken care of at home, by your family and you died under the supervision of your family.

Many of these things are different today. We live longer, we are taken care of at nursing homes and we die in hospitals. Perhaps people were better equipped to deal with death a 100 years ago, although the sadness of the loss was most likely identical.

WELL DONE!

You have completed the SOSU section of WorkSim. We recommend that you move onto the game section of the course now and test your skills.

Remember, you can always come back and practice again, or use WorkSim as a reference guide. In case you are looking for additional free learning ressources, we have provided a few links below:

Dansk Her og Nu

Online Dansk