Person-Centered Dementia Care Training
This is a workshop series that trains staff at senior care facilities in the principles and methods of person-centered dementia care. Our training improves the ability and confidence of caregiving staff to deal with residents with dementia therapeutically. Since residents with dementia can be quite difficult to connect with at times, our approach focuses especially on enhancing the staff's emotional attunement to the lived experience of residents with dementia. Staff will learn and practice group-oriented methods of engaging residents with dementia more effectively. Residents respond to these dementia-appropriate activities with increased social interaction and awareness of others. In consequence, overall levels of agitation and other “difficult behaviors” are reduced on the dementia unit.
Training Workshops
Process Consulting
Staff Support Groups
The full workshop series includes three phases of staff training:
Didactic and interactive workshops to help staff better understand dementia and how to work with residents with dementia.
Process consulting workshops that model person-centered dementia care in vivo with residents, and teach staff both group programming and facilitation skills.
An ongoing support group for staff, to help them cultivate and consolidate their skills, to the point where a person-centered approach becomes self-sustaining.
The dementia care training program which is offered by Aging Matters is based on a model originally developed with the NY City Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, and implemented with great success in pilot programs sponsored by the NY State Department of Health.
Benefits of a Dementia Care Training Initiative
Our Dementia Care Training Programs result in these benefits for staff who work with residents with dementia:
Building upon staff’s pre-existing knowledge and skill in their work with dementia
Improving staff’s emotional attunement towards the lived experience of dementia
Becoming more truly person-focused, drawing out more from resident’s interests and reactions
Enhancing staff’s sensitivity to the physical, social and spiritual needs of residents with dementia
Increasing staff’s sensitivity to the cognitive strengths and limitations of residents with dementia
Learning a repertoire of concrete skills to improve communication with residents with dementia
Enhancing staff’s coping skills in managing the challenging behavior of residents with dementia
Developing staff’s ability to discern and respond to each resident’s experience of their dementia
Improving staff’s teamwork via mutual respect for their different styles and joint problem-solving
