Staff Training and Educational Workshops

Our staff is available to provide educational workshops at your facility, association meeting, or conference. Here is a list of topics about which we often present. Lecture length and content can be tailored specifically to your organization’s learning needs. Please contact us for more information.

1) Physical Environment: This talk addresses ways to structure the physical environment so that it matches with the organization’s therapeutic goals. Typical topics include maximizing safety and security, providing privacy, promoting autonomy and control, enhancing sense of self and continuity with familiar patterns and routines. Both new construction and renovations can be addressed for the home, nursing home, assisted living, continuing care retirement communities and day care centers.

2) Total Environment: This talk deals with a much broader view of the environment, including social and organizational factors as well as physical environmental features. It usually also includes a review of different types of philosophies (medical model, social/day care, home-like, etc.) and may also get into therapeutic goals (depending on the length of the talk).

3) Key Elements of Dementia Care: The National Alzheimer’s Association has recently published a book the call Key elements of dementia care, which takes a global perspective of dementia care. This talk is a good overview for beginner audiences, but is not as appropriate for people who have been doing dementia care for a number of years.

4) Staff Training: This session uses experiential exercises to help staff and people who train staff increase their empathy for the residents’ experiences. It’s a very active session which involves the audience in many activities. Appropriate for aging in general as well as dementia.

5) Ethics in Long Term Care: This addresses the extent to which we, as concerned caregivers, often “rob” people with dementia of their personhood in the name of providing good care. This talk focuses on issues of quality of life, and different definitions of quality, and provides a framework for facilities to use when evaluating ethical dilemmas.

6) The Value and Use of Research: Reviews recent research on environmental design for elderly and those with dementia, emphasizes the importance of doing research, and how to get involved in it.

7) Models of Care: Recent research on culture change and models of care provides the foundation for examining different ways of conceptualizing the structure of long term care—particularly dementia care settings—and how this impacts care practices and environmental design.

8) How to develop a therapeutic recreation program for people with dementia. This workshop discusses memory systems and spared abilities of people at each stage of dementia. The discussion focuses on using spared abilities to compensate for deficits. Participants are given specific examples of activities that are appropriate for each stage of dementia.

9) Swallowing Disorders. This one hour lecture provides an introduction to the evaluation and treatment of eating and swallowing disorders for nurses and nursing assistants.

10) Using the Environment to Improve Intake for Person with Dementia. This lecture provides information about aspects of the dining environment that can affect intake and mealtime behaviors.

11) Using Spaced Retrieval to improve communication, memory and Activities of Daily Living. This lecture discusses a procedural memory technique found to be an effective method of teaching memory impaired individuals new information. The technique has been used by rehab staff, family caregivers and nursing staff.

12) Using the Physical Environment to Support Function of Persons with Dementia in Activity Programs. This session addresses the relationship between physical surroundings and the performance of persons with dementia. The effects of various deficits are discussed related to both the type of activity selected, the skills required, and the influence of physical environment. Simple ways to enhance resident experience and performance are addressed.

13) Educating Staff about Dementia Care. This can be a single session for planners, managers or trainers summarizing key elements of a dementia education program with sample plans and experiential exercises. An alternative format is a series of 6 to 8 1 hour educational sessions provided directly to staff.

14) Using Place-based Models of Care to Empower Line Staff is an interactive session demonstrating the practical application of Place-based Models of Care to care settings. Exercises to open staff to self-examination and critical assessment of care practices are demonstrated with case examples of successful applications.