Kelly: Dementia Care Includes Education for Family Members
When Home Instead® Care Professional of the Month Kelly Hermann is assigned to assist a dementia client, she knows that care usually is not solely limited to the client. Sometimes family members need to be brought up to speed about dementia behaviors and how to react to them.
“I always try to explain to the husbands what they are dealing with if their wives have dementia. Life changes for them after years of marriage. What kind of interaction should they now have with their wives? Sometimes a spouse gets frustrated with the behaviors and has to step out of the room to take a break. When we reach a point like that, I try to get the dementia client to laugh or refocus him or her somehow,” said Kelly, who joined Home Instead of Clearwater on July 17, 2021. Long before she came aboard the award-winning Home Instead franchise, Kelly had worked as a senior-care professional. In fact, the Rhode Island native became a CNA at age 17.
“I remember telling a husband, ‘Please don’t yell at your wife.’ He said his wife must not be able to hear him, so he has to yell. I softly explained to him that she gets exasperated when he yells at her and just clams up. I helped him understand the situation. On another day, he began doing it again, and I just gave him ‘that look’ without saying anything, and he said, ‘OK, I will go to the TV room,’ so he removed himself from the situation.”
Just as the client’s husband was learning how to cope with his wife’s dementia, Kelly pointed out that she continues to learn the newest dementia-care techniques, which benefit the clients and their family members.
To build on their knowledge and experience, Kelly and other Clearwater Care Pros are offered the opportunity to increase their dementia-care skills by taking part in the Home Instead network’s one-of-a-kind training protocol. Home Instead’s Person-Centered Care Training for Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias is recognized by the Alzheimer’s Association® for incorporating the evidence-based dementia-care practice recommendations in these topic areas: Alzheimer’s and dementia, person-centered care, assessment and care planning, activities of daily living, and behaviors and communication.
Kelly added: “I also have studied dementia a lot on my own and observed a number of teaching videos. It helps with learning how to deal with behaviors, either by reinforcing what you are doing or by picking up something different. The bottom line is that communication is so important. The clients might be losing their short-term memory, but they don’t lose their childhood memories or something that happened long ago. It’s amazing what they can tell you.”
Kelly also noted: “Some clients will ask the same question over and over. I patiently give them the same answer. There is absolutely no reason to get nasty with them. They don’t realize they are being repetitious. Perhaps the worst stage of dementia is when a person realizes he or she has dementia, that he or she is ‘losing it,’ – as they have actually told me – when they mean memory and comprehension. It can be as simple as repeatedly losing keys or a TV remote.”
The daughter of a client, a medical professional, researched dementia so thoroughly that she said she could predict several milestones and “fall-off points,” and even the imminent death of someone with late-stage dementia.
“In the case of one client,” Kelly explained, “she was in a wheelchair but could stand to dress herself and take care of her own personal care. Once she stopped getting up from the wheelchair, she ended up being bed-bound and never got up again, so one key is to try to keep them moving around as much as possible. We ultimately had to get her a hospital bed with a railing so she wouldn’t roll out of bed. Sadly, it is a downward spiral, but you’ve got to continue to be positive with them and try to build them up emotionally as much as you can. Death is really hard because you get so close to them. You just treat them as dear ones, just as if they are family.”
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