At its core, person-centered senior care is about providing support in ways that meet the unique needs of each individual, instead of creating a “one-size-fits-all” system. This means that instead of having every single resident follow the same daily routine or meal service, staff work together to develop personalized routines that reflect each resident’s habits, preferences, and experiences.
How Does a Person-Centered Plan Affect the Development of Daily Routines?
The underlying components of a person-centered care plan are usually derived from information that would never show up in a medical chart. When developing a person-centered care plan, teams will gather an array of information, including but not limited to: the residents’ preferred wake-up and bedtime hours; their favorite foods and dislikes; their cultural background; their comfort level with social interaction; if there are any sensory issues; and if there are any things that trigger them. Additionally, teams will gather information about the residents’ past experiences and previous routines, for example, previous employment, household responsibilities, hobbies, and family dynamics. This information is typically gathered using structured interviews with the resident, input from their family members, and by observing the resident during the first few weeks after moving into the community. The ultimate goal is to develop an understanding of the patterns that influence a resident’s sense of comfort, participation, and distress.
Making a Resident’s Life History Become a Part of Their Daily Routines
The philosophy becomes real when it changes how care is delivered. Residents can now take baths and get dressed at times of the day that fit with their own personal preferences, rather than being forced to follow a set schedule that applies to all residents. Meals can now include residents’ favorite dishes, portions of food, and even where they sit to eat. Communication with the staff can be adjusted to meet each resident’s learning style.
Creativity Applied to Function
In practice, creative expression can be demonstrated through the choices made by the staff about which activity matches the cognitive ability, focus, and sensory needs of the individual resident. These options could be coloring with a limited color palette, drawing using guidance, working with clay or pottery using soft materials, folding the laundry, organizing cards or buttons by color, completing large piece puzzles, caring for plants, singing familiar songs and participating in other musical routines, or structured movement such as chair yoga, a short walk, or light stretching. Structured movement can provide a similar function as it provides the resident with a pre-determined sequence. The benefits of these activities are functional; they help develop fine motor skills, help create a sense of structure during the day, help minimize idle time that can create restlessness, and aid in creating calm transitions from leisure activities to care activities such as mealtime, bath time, and bedtime.
Tracking Success and Maintaining Consistency
While person-centered care is primarily an observational process, it can be measured, too. Many communities will track the individualized approaches to hygiene, mobility, meals, medication support, and engagement within the resident’s care plan, and then track indicators of progress such as appetite, sleep regularity, participation, fall risk, and the number of times the resident exhibits distress behavior. In dementia specific care environments, consistent routines and predictable responses from the staff can decrease agitation and minimize the use of sedative medications when necessary. Reliability across shifts is critical, which is one reason families look for a memory care community with a strong reputation that can execute care plans consistently.
Questions to Ask When Evaluating a Potential Community
Useful questions focus on implementation. Questions that should be asked include:
- How do you collect and update the resident’s life history?
- Where are the residents’ preferences documented, and how are they communicated to the staff during handoff?
- How do you adjust routines when the staff changes?
- What data do you track to determine if your approach is working?
The effectiveness of person-centered care depends heavily upon its consistency in all aspects of a resident’s day-to-day life. This requires knowledge of a person’s past, their likes and dislikes, and their routines, in order to utilize this information as the basis for providing care and activities. When searching for an appropriate community, look for care centers that can demonstrate how they put these details into practice because a well-structured, individualized care plan will likely lead to more predictable and successful outcomes.