Consulting - Main

Roll-up-the-sleeves, hands-on CONSULTING

We’ve found that it’s one thing to talk about “resident quality of life” and “culture change.”  It’s altogether another thing to actually show “resident quality of life” and “culture change.” 

Many long-term care organizations describe our on-site consulting-coaching packages as “the missing link” between theory and practice.  Don’t expect endless meetings, check-lists, or “do’s and don’ts.”  Instead, expect lots of work on the floor – we actually demonstrate how to move away from the old-fashioned “Medical Model of Care” toward a much more “home-like” or “person-centered” type of care – and leave behind the tools to do it.
 

Life Enrichment WORKS

The benefits of implementing our Life Enrichment Program are significant.  It helps caregivers in nursing homes, assisted living, and memory care facilities provide persons with Alzheimer’s Disease and other types of dementia the very highest possible quality of life, ensuring that every day is filled with moments that matter: moments of genuine pleasure, genuine purpose, and genuine peace. 

Professional caregivers typically report a tremendous “clinical” improvement for residents – fewer falls, less psychotropic mood-altering medication use, less agitation and anxiety, improved appetite, improved sleep cycle patterns, and fewer “aggressive” or “combative” types of responses.  
Why does Life Enrichment work?

Award-winning, Interdisciplinary Dementia Programs

Our unique Life Enrichment modules feature a “do-as-we-do” approach.  You see, we’re not like other consultants.  Coaching, demonstrating and encouraging the implementation of our techniques, we work side-by-side with all professional and front-line staff. 

Role-playing, exercises and discussions help staff internalize the training, increasing their sensitivity to residents’ needs as well as discovering practical ways they can reduce their own frustrations when dealing with elders in decline.  As attitudes change and confidence builds among staff, there is immediate improvement in resident receptivity.

Life Enrichment: The Alzheimer’s Dementia Lounge

In long-term care, residents are literally “losing their brains” to normal, cognitive aging or degenerative dementia disease.  Too often, residents with dementia are “classified” by what they cannot do, by what parts of their brain do not work. 

The  Alzheimer’s Dementia Lounge consultation helps participating staff design their own “lounge” space of strength-based activity stations through the implementation of our simple, low-budget, yet creative, ideas.  All benefit from a reduction in wandering and falls, agitation, combativeness, sun-downing behaviors, and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s-type dementia. 

In addition to serving anxious, restless, combative residents, the Lounge serves bored, disinterested residents not prone to agitation – those who just sit and sit. 
How does The Alzheimer’s Dementia Lounge work? 

Life Enrichment: Therapeutic Small Groups

Somewhere beneath the bewildered countenance, combative behavior, or un-recognizable new personality of the moderately-severe dementia / Alzheimer’s patient is a person whose value is much more than the label he / she wears.  We find involving persons with dementia in therapeutic small-group activities offers a compassionate way to deliver genuine pleasure, purpose, and peace to recipients.  Staff consultations include participation in our small group demonstrations where emphasis is placed on beginning/middle/end sequencing of the resident experience and the use of simple and inexpensive props through themed, therapeutic small group kits.  Family members are also invited to share our proven and powerful techniques for enriching the lives of their cognitively-impaired loved ones!  How do Therapeutic Small Groups work? 

Life Enrichment: Soft Sensory Interventions

Our objective is to reach individuals in the end stages of severe dementia / Alzheimer’s, and we’d like to see this type of therapeutic programming become the standard in long-term care.  To this end, we have effective interventions to facilitate connection with the brains, bodies, and spirits of your least responsive residents.  We use soft sensory activities such as dementia-appropriate aroma therapy, music and rhythms, and gentle touch.

Soft Sensory interventions can serve almost any resident with dementia.  However, many organizations find that these interventions are critical for those residents near the very end of the dementia process.  We now know that residents who have previously been considered “unresponsive” can indeed be “responsive” when provided with these newest approaches to dementia care.  Soft Sensory interventions are typically used to: 

Soft Sensory Benefits
1) increase the alertness of seemingly “unresponsive” residents with very advanced dementia
2) decrease the agitation of residents with very advanced dementia.
 

We believe that tapping into the sleeping memories and fragile responses of these end-stage patients is a gift to residents and a respectful recognition for families of the value and dignity of their stricken member.  Often, our methods can help soothe an otherwise distracted, agitated or suffering patient, improving the environment of the home and easing the demands on caregivers.