Category Archives: Senior Care Professionals

Senior Care Professionals, The Family Caregiver

Senior Care – How Our Pets Teach Us Life Lessons

Leave a comment
pet lossHow Losing A Pet Is Much Like Losing a Loved One

Our pets are like members of the family. Meet Sadie – our vivacious, furry family member pictured here at 3 months old. Labrador Retrievers at this age are a non-stop ball of energy. Leave a sock on the floor and it instantly becomes a pile of thread, or a new game of hide and seek. Strangers? I don’t think Sadie ever knew that word existed. Water? That’s meant for swimming.. endlessly.

Sadie was, as my son described her, the MVP of campers. In fact, our treasured family camping trips centered around Sadie. Will there be a lake or hiking trails? And Sadie always chose where and with whom she wanted to sleep at any given time. Since our activities centered around what Sadie would enjoy, it made things easy. She loved EVERYTHING about camping, especially being with us and meeting new friends. Sadie would always introduce herself to our camping neighbors. She would sometimes wander off to explore new trails, strange critters, and/or new scents but she always came back to her family because she loved us and she knew she was the queen bee.

Saying good-bye to Sadie

With the whole family present and a lot of tears, we had to have Sadie laid to rest last week. At over 14, she was in ill health; despite pain medications and other palliative measures, it was clear that every day was a struggle for her to get around. And while she couldn’t tell us what parts of her body were failing her, we could sense growing discomfort and complications taking place. Up to the very last second of her life, Sadie never stopped pouring out her boundless love and certainly relished the affection and trust we shared. Our relationship over the years was a bond that encircled our lives. Even as our children grew up and left home, that bond would be rekindled in an instant with Sadie when they came home to visit.

How pets teach us about life

Pets are soulful creatures that teach us about the importance of trusting relationships, comfort, touch, playfulness, love of nature and so much more. These traits never left Sadie.. not even when she was at the end of life. These intact abilities remain for us humans as we age. There are many good websites that deal with the loss of a beloved pet.  Here is a good blog that deals with pet grieving. It talks about pets in a very human way.

 

Senior Care Professionals

Mandatory Dementia Care Training: A Good Start

4 Comments
Dementia care training: learning is just the first step.
Learning is just the first step in dementia care training.

Many  adults with dementia reside in nursing homes or assisted living. Still others attend adult day care  or receive home care services. The need for caregivers to provide quality care has never been greater. Dementia care training standards is a hot topic since federal and state legislation established new mandatory dementia care training requirements.

The New Training Standards:
 Each organization is now tasked with ensuring that training requirements are met. This applies not only to direct-care staff, but ALL new and existing staff. Maintenance, dietary, office workers,  volunteers and contracted workers are included. The new regulations require a specific number of hours of dementia training when first employed, as well as annual training updates.

The Federal Register published October 4, 2016 provides only broad guidelines for training topics in Section 483.95. It states training topics must include:

  • Communication
  • Resident rights
  • Abuse and neglect
  • Quality assurance and performance improvement
  • Infection control
  • Ethics and behavioral health

For nurse aides serving  individuals with cognitive impairment, training “must address the care of the cognitively impaired.” Also required is training for feeding assistants.

Most who work in eldercare want to feel confident in their jobs and welcome training. However,  I think it’s time to leave behind the monthly required employee in-service model.  I’m sure I’m not alone in having presented at these meetings only to find a lethargic audience that was there only to pick up their paychecks after the meeting.  Consequently, nothing productive, let alone inspiring, results.  It begs the question: What kind of training truly leads to dementia care competency?  Furthermore, how can mandatory training reach beyond the basics to change attitudes and actions?

Re-frame Training: Now is the Time
In a series of posts I’ll explore components of core education that will help meet the new training standards. Especially relevant, training should lead to skills, knowledge and behavior expected for the delivery of dementia services.  What components do you think are essential?

Senior Care Professionals, The Family Caregiver

Dementia Care: How to Make Magic Connections

Leave a comment

Dementia care magic-wandWhen visiting someone with dementia, be ready for anything. Things can change day- to- day, even moment- to- moment in dementia care. A little preparation can go a long way to help create a positive experience in dementia care. Have a “magic bag” ready that you can pull things out of that may reach through the dementia to the person inside.

The magic begins by interacting with all the senses. Though some senses may have diminished from effects of dementia, other senses may still be sharp. In previous posts, we suggested pictures or items to bring back memories. There’s memory magic in senses beyond just vision.

The key to creating magic is to learn what the person did in the past or what was happening in the era that they grew up in, and then recreate sensory experiences to evoke memories.

Sound magic is not limited to just music. You can find recorded sounds of just about anything online, especially on Youtube. Here are a few favorite examples.

Familiar sounds often help to recall memories and evoke emotions and stories are sure to follow.

Touch magic is made with texture of familiar things from a person’s life. Present different textures of things such as fruits, fabrics, sand, beans, string/yarn, seashells, leaves, doll babies, tools, engines, aprons. Explore with many objects to discover which ones bring comfort or trigger memories.

If your magic bag contains objects to see, hear and touch, you’ll be equipped to conjure special moments. Care partners become detectives as we look for pieces of life. Because you never know what that one thing will be that reaches a forgotten piece. The magic happens while taking the journey together.

Senior Care Professionals

Dementia Training Regulations – Positive Changes in Resident Care

Leave a comment

Dementia Training RegulationsNew CMS dementia training regulations to enhance person-centered care practices. Any new regulation makes us quiver. More paperwork, increased oversight, complex guidelines. But the new CMS dementia training requirements under Section 483.95 is one step closer to creating communities focused on person-centered care.
Training will be extended beyond nurse aides to include all staff.
This is huge! It only makes sense that if nurse aides receive quality dementia training that this include therapy, social services, dietary, dining services, management, volunteers and contracted employees. When everyone who interacts with that resident or patient is trained in communications and responding to behaviors, we will see culture changes taking place, more accurate accountability and outcomes tracking and a more satisfied workforce.
Innovative dementia training across the long term care spectrum is growing exponentially as eldercare becomes more about dementia care.
Leaders should be looking not only at core competency training but how their education and training will be integrated and serve as an ongoing team building and staff development tool. What measures will be established to ensure that staff empowerment is taking place, particularly in the challenging areas of communications, understanding resident rights, abuse prevention and behavioral health.
Workforce retention is a hot topic and promises to be at the top of the list for many years. If training programs do not tools and techniques that will empower and instill confidence in skills, encourage new ideas (that we listen to and implement!), we will see far too many front line workers leave the senior care industry. None of us can afford to see this happen.
What a great time to reassess where we’ve been in the areas of staff training and ongoing education for all of our stakeholders, and we include families and our local community when we look at the far reaching effects that dementia has at all levels of our society.
New regulations are the impetus for us to change our thinking and this is exciting!

https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-10-04/pdf/2016-23503.pdf

Federal Register