Gearing up for 2024!

With the New Year fast approaching, we are looking forward to expanding our reach, adding a team member, and launching a new service designed for professional care partners - Gear Day!

Gear Day is a two hour intensive practice session that can be added on to any workshop or coaching opportunity. With a focus on continuing to build on skills specific to a variety areas of dementia care, some topics include:

» Communication Strategies

» Understanding Unmet Needs

» Advanced Care Approaches

» Determining the Progression of the Disease

This can be geared towards specific topics or challenges your agency is facing - each Gear Day is unique to your needs!

For agencies that completed our Champion Courses, hosting a Gear Day is recommended quarterly or semi-annually to continue to sharpen the skills learned.

When we are trying to reason, orient, convince, argue or explain something to someone that is living with dementia, it causes more confusion, frustration, and loses trust and a sense of safety between each other.

Instead of continuing to respond in the same ways we may have in the past, we are actively trying to retrain our brains to pause, and get in the water with the person living with dementia...to see things from their perspective.

By utilizing the tools we have learned to reflect, investigate, apologize, reassure, and validate their reality, which in turn gives us time to pause and try to respond to meet their unmet need(s).

Our goal isn’t to stop the person with brain change from communicating their need, but to interpret the need they are communicating. Using the FISH Approach, we realize that the reality of the person with brain changes is “in the water.” As care partners, we need to get in the water to better understand unmet needs.

To do this, we:

• Pause and observe what they are doing/saying

• Translate it into a message

• Respond with an attempt to meet the need

If communication continues or comes back, attempt to respond to another need.

Now Scheduling Dementia Care Workshops for 2024

Geared towards professional caregivers - this robust training opportunity is our number one request (aside from The FISH Approach)!

Designed to guide care partners in developing an awareness about how brain changes impact people's everyday experiences and how our approach impacts this experience. In these workshops, we explore the role of the care partner in enhancing the quality of life for people living with dementia. By building skills specifically to meet the needs of the person we are providing cares with, we enhance the experience for staff and the person living with dementia.

In 2023 Dementia Care Solutions provided

107 Champion Courses to over 1,000 participants!

"I wanted you to know that our Caregiver shared with me how impactful the training was to her. She told me that she used many of the tips to assist a client living with dementia in the showering routine & in her words… "It ACTUALLY works!! My client washed herself in the shower, put on deodorant & brushed her hair!” The caregiver commented that she noticed how good it made her client feel that she could do these things herself & she seemed happier."

It is the success stories like the one above that make me continue to do what I do. Together we are continuing to unlock doors to better dementia care experiences. Thank you for being a part of this community dedicated to improving lives of those living with dementia, and their care partners!