Evolve Care Group’s training academy, Evolve Care Academy, continued with its second training programme of 2024. “The Alice Years” is the theme of the year-long training programme which uses the symbolism of Alice in Wonderland, to teach over 850 team members and involve them in interactive sessions. This is achieved over 4 separate training days, and the programme which was launched in November 2023, is held in the Bristol training centre. We are proud to announce that this is now a CPD accredited training programme.
Eve Carder, Clinical Director for Evolve, authored and delivered the training programme centred around the concept of “Control.” Control is defined as ‘to order, limit or rule something, or someone’s actions and/or behaviours’. However, Eve explained during the training a more positive attitude to looking at control. This is that we can “understand the impact and balance of control between receiver and caregiver, which is the most underused but the most effective tool that we have at our disposal in social care. Implementing control in this way can improve the emotional well-being of those receiving our care, and help to support the job satisfaction of the caregivers that work in this Community.”
First, the room was introduced to the reason why we were all there, and with a touch of humour, the importance of the next six hours would be explained. Team members learned how to positively implement control. For example, if a resident (fondly referred to as a family member) is showing expressive behaviours, instead of a team member holding their arm and controlling their movement, they are instead taught to move with the family members’ movements to avoid any sense of restriction. How somebody living with a Dementia would feel if they were being controlled was demonstrated creatively through the use of carefully selected Alice in Wonderland scenes. For example, when Alice falls down the rabbit hole. This was shown to the room to visualise aspects of Dementia like living with memory loss, disorientation, and being in a dark environment. In the scene Alice lands upside down, all doors were locked, and all the walls looked the same which influenced Alice to display panicked behaviour. Similarly, how somebody living with a Dementia might be triggered to portray expressive behaviors was shown with another clip. Another central message of the training day was how distressing it can be for someone with a Dementia if they are forced back to behaving conventionally. This can be disorientating for them as they wouldn’t have been aware of their disillusions before.
The positives and perceivements of control:
The little things we can do every day for someone on a Dementia journey which can make their continuation of life a more positive experience was taught. Examples of the different ways we exercise control within our role were brainstormed and shared across the group, the 6 categories were; Environmental. Physical, Chemical, Equipment, Emotional, and Psychological. Some examples such as being self-aware of your own tone of voice and non-verbal body language were thoroughly discussed. Informative sessions like these were introduced to demonstrate how impactful your interactions can be to others, one which demonstrated the impact of control was called ‘Magic Weavers’. This activity invited team members to think of 5 people who have impacted their life, identify if they know them personally or not, and what qualities they had that made them impactful.
Another poignant highlight of this discussion was the message of managing pain and in particular, the introduction of any sedative or antipsychotics to be a last resort within our care homes. The controversial use of these drugs are infamously used as a way of controlling patients in hospitals, so Evolve Care Academy’s message on these is clear, “never go to antipsychotics before managing pain”. Not understanding the needs of a person on a Dementia journey, can result in the wrong medication being requested and prescribed.
Lastly, the different stages of behaviours and arousal states of people on a Dementia journey were described using a ‘green, amber, red’ coding system, with the initiative to learn how to maintain a consistency between green and amber. In behaviour terms, this is where the person living with a Dementia is at a normal level of ‘emotional consciousness’ before they might be triggered to panic or enter the ‘red’ stage. In this case, the training covered how to ‘rescue’ someone who may become emotionally distressed. One example to rescuing someone with a Dementia who is in the ‘red’ stage is by joining their reality, or rescuing them from a distressing environment. To conclude this segment of training, how you act and think to enable the person to feel in control was also discussed.
Once the training day came to an end, many conversations had been shared, first-hand experiences had been discussed, and ideas had been analysed. Participants walked away with an enhanced self-belief as individuals for our responsibilities to the people they care for, and how they can positively implement control when it’s needed.
We often ask ourselves when designing training for our teams – how would we want our parents to be treated if this was them. This has to be the ultimate test. We definitely would not want our parents chemically sedated, we would want someone to take the time to understand the triggers behind the distress and respond appropriately. We would not want the emotional pain disguised by chemicals for our parents and therefore we certainly do not want it disguised for those people that choose to make our home, their home.
By taking the time to understand the person, and train our teams to look for the clues and interpret them correctly, we can drastically improve the immediate response to situations that arise in a care home. This clearly can massively impact the quality of life that a person experiences.
To find out more Evolve Care Academy’s training programs please visit https://www.evolvecareacademy.com/