Recent in-service helps staff understand dementia experience
Wednesday, October 25, 2006 -- Natalie Miller
As a nurse’s aide, Barb Fox hopes on a regular basis she responds sensitively to the needs of residents with dementia.

However, she was provided with a fresh perspective recently when she took part in a training exercise aimed at helping caregivers understand the dementia experience.

“You realize how frustrated and lost they feel,” says Barb, a Maplewood employee.

Maplewood employees take part in an in-service aimed at helping them understand the dementia experience.

“They have no idea where they are and what’s going on. It opened my eyes a little bit more.”

Barb was one of eight frontline staff members at the Brighton long-term care home to take part in the recent training offered by staff member from a neighbouring hospital’s psychogeriatric outreach team. The education involved using a series of props such as taped eyeglasses, ankle weights and a bungee cord fastening participants’ knees together. Vision, co-ordination and gait can all be impacted by dementia.

Life enrichment co-ordinator Chris Charlebois, who was involved in organizing the training, found the in-service useful.

“It went really well,” says Chris.

“Even though I’ve been through (a similar exercise) before, it was a real eye-opener. It’s a good refresher.”

Participants performed tasks like putting on a dressing gown with restricted movement and vision while a staff member speaks to them in gibberish. As part of the exercise, they were fed different foods without warning and were talked about as though they weren’t in the room.

The series of simulation exercises and the training day were offered to launch Maplewood’s supportive measures education program.

Supportive measures is a practice whereby caregivers focus on individual needs and preferences of residents living with Alzheimer disease or related dementia. By identifying factors that trigger resident disease-related agitation, interventions can be put in place to remove many of these factors from the resident's daily life and reduce the need for psychotropic medications.

While Chris is the only supportive measures specialist at the Brighton long-term care home, she says others are instinctively employing supportive measures which will make her job training others easier.

In early October, OMNI unveiled details of its corporate strategy to ensure all employees are trained in supportive measures by the end of 2007. Supportive measures specialists gathered in Peterborough recently to hear more about how each home will roll out the supportive measures training program.