Woodland to roll out supportive measures training with DVD
Wednesday, February 21, 2007 -- Natalie Miller
Woodland Villa’s supportive measures team is in the process of creating a DVD to help educate long-term care home employees about the brain and dementia.

It’s part of the Long Sault long-term care home’s effort to educate all of the nursing home employees in OMNI’s dementia care approaches by the end of the year.

“Right now we’re in the early stages of implementation,” says Debbie Harding, supportive measures specialist and clinical care co-ordinator at Woodland Villa.

“We’ll be ready to go forward with module one in March.”

Woodland Villa is using a DVD educative video package to provide a consistent training approach for current staff and future employees of the 111-bed long-term care home. Training will involve watching the videos, associated work and a question period. The supportive measures team is currently working on the script and a plan for the first module in the training package – the brain. The team’s goal is to have the first video complete for the March 22 training session.

The training session will be for 16 staff members from the home’s various departments, a mix of people who have some formal supportive measures training and some who don’t. This way, everyone is starting on the same page and educated the same way, Harding notes. Even if staff don’t have formal training yet, everyone in the building is familiar with supportive measures concepts and has seen some of the interventions in action, Harding says.

“We’re trying to put forth an education package that will sustain itself.” Using a standard training package means staff won’t have “reinvent the wheel” every time a new employee is to be trained. As well, the theory behind this particular education package is individuals can use it as a self-study.

Woodland Villa recently recruited from within to strengthen its supportive measures team. There are now 16 people representing a variety of departments. “We were looking for people who could see how supportive measures improve residents’ lives. They’re really gung-ho.”

Methods of educating staff have taken on different forms in each of OMNI’s homes. Springdale Country Manor in Springville is also using a video to complement training, while Maplewood in Brighton is using brief in-services designed to produce maximum absorption of the material while not interfering with care.

Supportive measures training has also started at Almonte Country Haven in Almonte, where employees are getting a chance to apply the skills they’re learning in an environment catering specifically to residents who have frontal lobe dementia. The eastern Ontario long-term care home transformed its second dining room into a space where staff can provide more hands-on support for eight residents with dementia-related agitation.

Supportive measures is a practice whereby caregivers focus on individual needs and preferences of residents living with Alzheimer disease or related dementia to increase quality of life. By identifying factors that trigger resident agitation, interventions can be used to remove many of these factors from the resident’s daily life and ideally reduce the need for psychotropic medications.