NursePartners’ Senior Recruiter, Lakeya Dula, completes her training to become a PAC certified dementia coach. After on site training in Baltimore with Teepa Snow, Rebekah Wilson visited us at the NursePartners office in Philadelphia. Rebekah served as Lakeya’s mentor throughout these past 8 weeks. Lakeya and Rebekah used the PAC materials and tools from the course to increase Lakeya’s confidence in becoming an effective coach to our carepartners.
The Positive Approach to Care (PAC) methodology was created by Teepa Snow in response to the shortcomings of other dementia progression models. Other models seemed to focus on the cognitive decline, versus emphasizing what the person could still do. Each in the last stage (Pearl), a person still exists behind the ugly façade of the disease. Teepa sought to teach others how to connect before providing care, which is the bedrock of any effective carepartner relationship.
As a dementia coach, Lakeya plays a fundamental role in training each carepartner before they begin working with us. Lakeya leads a dementia workshop where we act out various difficult situations with our carepartners. NursePartners’ admin takes on the role of our clients and the carepartners show us how they would respond in a given situation. Carepartners consent to being video recorded. This allows them to watch their own interaction later, from the view of the client. This activity helps them break preconceived conceptions and to adapt their own care approaches to become more effective carepartners.
During this workshop, carepartners learn about the GEM levels, the Positive Physical Approach to Care, and receive a general overview of dementia. Afterwards, carepartners must complete additional training in order to become eligible to work with any of our clients living with dementia.
Lakeya is the third member of the NursePartners administrative team to complete a certification with Teepa Snow. Angela Geiger embraced the methodology as the basis to create the GEM division in 2012. She became certified as the company’s PAC dementia trainer in additional to another national certification as a dementia practitioner. Peter Abraldes developed the dementia program with Angela in 2016 to make this training a requirement for any carepartner working with a client living with dementia. At this time, all other admin members were trained as well. This prepared us to respond to any issue arising from clients, family members of clients, or carepartners.
NursePartners also provides training to family members and other organizations as requested. We have seem the effectiveness of this approach in the field and always glad to help others provide more effective care to their loved ones or clients.
