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Category: culture change

Inside The Best Friends Staff, Second Edition

The second edition of the bestselling staff training tool from the Best Friends™ product suite is packed with resources to help staff in dementia care gain the required skills and confidence to deliver optimal care and succeed in this challenging caregiver role. Here, we break down the contents of the book so that you can see just how it can work for you! Part I discusses the foundations of effective training and provides an overview of the Best Friends approach. Reinvent and Energize Training Chapter 1 describes ways to reinvent and energize boring and ineffectual training programs. Currently, many providers…

How Can The Best Friends Staff Work for Me?

The Best Friends Staff: Learning to Deliver Exceptional Dementia Care focuses on the education and training for professionals learning to create an outstanding memory care program. The book is written for a wide audience of individuals working in long-term care settings, such as in-home services, adult day centers, assisted living, and skilled nursing care. The book will also be helpful for family care partners seeking to learn more about care services for their family members. If you work in memory care at any level, in any role, here is how this book can benefit you. Program administrators will learn how…

Leading Change in Memory Care: Commitment to Ongoing Education

I like to point out to people working in senior living that change will not only benefit their residents but also their bottom line. I work with families who are beginning their search for a life-affirming environment for a loved one. On a recent call with a man who had toured four nearby places with his father, he could not answer my question about which one he preferred. “Honestly, I can’t tell them apart. They all promise wonderful things, but I didn’t see [evidence of them] as we toured.” If you can tell the stories of the people’s lives you…

Behind Locked Doors: Segregation in Memory Care

Memory care is the fastest-growing area of senior living. It is now standard for assisted living communities and nursing homes to designate an area for a secure unit, usually with a coded keypad on the door. This is where the residents living with dementia will live, segregated from the rest of the residents. Often these secured units, with their extra charges, are the most expensive areas to live. I have worked as a registered nurse long enough to remember when it was also standard to tie people in their chairs or beds “for their own good.” None of us would…

5 Inspiring Stories of Meaningful Person-Centered Memory Care

Small Ways Care Partners Have Improved Quality of Life and Made a Difference This post was excerpted from Getting Dementia Care Right: What’s Not Working and How It Can Change by Anne Ellett, M.S.N., NP. Copyright © 2023 by Health Professions Press. I have had so many meaningful experiences over the years working in memory care. I have worked with countless wonderful support partners and leaders, people who took the time to listen to an individual resident, advocated for him or her, and provided a gentle touch at just the needed moment to improve that person’s day. The following stories…

The 5 Main Flaws of Nonpharmacological Interventions (and How to Address Them Without Medication)

This post was excerpted from Dementia Beyond Disease: Enhancing Well-Being by G. Allen Power, M.D. (2017, Health Professions Press) Why Nonpharmacological Interventions Do Not Work This provocative heading may seem out of line for the author of a book called Dementia Beyond Drugs. Rest assured, I remain firmly rooted in the belief that most distress arises as expressions of unmet needs, and that drugs are not the answer. (For a deep dive on this, see Dementia Beyond Drugs: Changing the Culture of Care, Second Edition.) The problem lies not in that underlying philosophy, but…

Can We Achieve Drug-Free Dementia Care?

It may seem unrealistic to expect that we can care for people without using any psychotropic drugs for their various expressions. What is clear, however, is that a new approach to dementia can drastically reduce the use of these medications, making them the exception rather than the rule. We have seen a similar learning curve with the use of physical restraints in nursing homes. Due to the tireless work of pioneers, including Carter Catlett Williams, Lois Evans, and Neville Strumpf, these once-common features of nursing homes are rapidly disappearing. Many nursing homes are now restraint-free; I have not personally ordered…

The Dementia Experience

The Experiential Model of Dementia Care The biomedical model (that is, a mindset of dementia that focuses only on physical and cognitive decline) sees dementia mostly as neuropathology. However, viewing only what can be easily observed and measured is inadequate to our needs. We must ask ourselves: how is dementia experienced by the person with the changing brain? That experience is more than simple structural and chemical defects; many other factors come into play, such as life history, relationships, ethnicity and culture, values, spirituality, interactions, and coping styles. Seeing dementia as a life experience and viewing the world through those…

Leadership: Institutional vs. Person-Centered

What is person-centered leadership? Author Nancy Fox argues that it is the exact opposite of the outdated and harmful institutional leadership model. Here’s why. This post was adapted from Lessons in Leadership for Person-Centered Elder Care by Nancy Fox. Copyright © 2017 by Health Professions Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Have you ever been at a party and had someone leave the table to “toilet” themselves? Have you ever heard someone refer to their grandmother as “the feeder?” These are examples of horrendous language the institutional model in long-term care has given us. Indeed, there is much…

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