New: Dementia Capable Care
The behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia are not an inevitability, but they are more likely to occur when the person living with dementia is not supported with an ‘enriched model’ of care and support.
Our updated Dementia Capable Care programme provides this model so that carers can learn how to offer this approach.
Essentially, this programme enables carers to more effectively support the person, maximise their quality of life and minimise the psychological and behavioural symptoms. Doing so also reduces any reliance on antipsychotics, sedatives and other restrictive practices.
What’s new about Dementia Capable Care?
First and foremost, we always listen to feedback and have heard how challenging it can be for staff to take time away from the day job for training. So our new programme is more time efficient in these ways:
- For our Instructor Certification Programme: instead of requiring three days to become a Certified Instructor, it now only takes 1.5 days - all done virtually.
- For those taught by a Certified Instructor: instead of the Certified Instructor and their participants needing to be in a classroom together for 8–16 hours, this new programme and blended learning approach reduces total training time to 6–8 hours, with about half taking place online and half being taught by an Instructor.
- It’s great new content based on the enriched model approach.
Course enhancements
- Integrating the core components of Dementia Capable Care: Foundation and Dementia Capable Care: Behaviours into one programme, CPI’s Dementia Capable Care blends the Claudia Allen Cognitive Disabilities Model and Kitwood’s model of person-centred care with CPI verbal de-escalation techniques and expertise in a fresh and efficient new approach.
- The training - both for Instructor certification and workplace training - is now a blended programme, with a portion of materials presented online and a portion being Instructor-led.
- The refresh is applicable globally. Content supports all individuals living with dementia, whether in the US, UK, France, or any other location.
- Another reason for the update is that becoming certified to teach a programme full of content that truly impacts knowledge and skill can be daunting, and for some it could take a while to gain the confidence and mastery to teach. That’s why we’ve now taken the core content and integrated it into an online learning component.
Benefits for Certified Instructors
- With core content first taught in the online module, this new programme makes it easier for Certified Instructors to focus the Instructor-led class time on application work.
- Our Instructor Certification Programme is now virtual, saving on time and travel costs.
- The re-designed Instructor Guide makes it easier than ever for Instructors to deliver the programme.
Benefits for staff/caregivers
- The online portion of the content offers continuing education units for all participants. This includes the staff that Certified Instructors teach.
- The programme focuses on frontline staff. The core audience our Certified Instructors teach are frontline staff, so we used this lens as we refreshed Dementia Capable Care. Now more than ever, the language, examples, and case studies will resonate with frontline staff while being applicable for all who work in healthcare and other care settings.
- The programme has a fresh new look, using a multimedia approach to help learners stay engaged, and inspire interest in improving their care approaches.
Benefits of having core content in the online learning component
- Certified Instructors’ burden is lessened.
- Content is delivered consistently.
- Certified Instructors can focus more on application in their Instructor-led portion.
To summarise, we created Dementia Capable Care to address the number one request from our customers – to reduce the amount of training time, without compromising the integrity of the programme, and to make it easier for our CIs to train their frontline staff.
We couldn’t be happier with the end results. We can’t wait for you to see our new CPI Dementia Capable Care model, which serves as the framework for learning and for care delivery. It pulls everything together for a great learning experience and a model that can and should be used every day in your dementia care.
*You can watch our Dementia Capable Care webinar that covered the programme and its enriched model of support.