Dementia Champions Change Project
Maintaining relationships between grandparents and grandchildren in Nursing Homes
Beda Cecchetti: Dementia Champion, St Mary's Hospital, Dublin.
Transcript
What was the problem you were trying to address?
The care home that I was looking at is not at all child friendly and I noticed that there were fewer and fewer children visiting. Grandparents would say they’d come for a while but then because it wasn’t child friendly, there was nothing for them to do, there was nothing for them to do with the grandparents together, the visits became less and less frequent so I wanted to try and maintain relationships between the grandparents and the grandchildren for as long as possible.
What was your vision for how it should be?
My vision was that I could do two things really.
One was to (and it seems very simple) to make the care home child friendly. Source a space and to put some very simple child friendly toys, activities, even jigsaws that the grandparent and the child could do together..that they have something to do that would help them form the bond if the communication was breaking down or if there was any kind of relationship difficulties. I felt activity based..would help both the grandparent and the child.
What did you do?
I had to first convince quite a few people that to see if the project was worth doing because children actually weren’t that welcome in the care home I discovered. The Director of Nursing actually thought they were a bit of a nuisance as they were running up and down the corridors when they did come. So the first thing I had to do was convince a number of people. The clinical nurse specialist in dementia was especially helpful because she had a vision as well. So once we talked to all the relevant people, that part actually was quite simple because we then just had to source a space. Maintanience and administration were really helpful and there was a space in the foyer anyhow that we could idenfity and we weren’t looking for a big space. That was the first thing.
The second bit was that children don’t understand dementia and parents don’t explain dementia to children because they find it very difficult. So what I decided to do rather than develop leaflets, I would develop work books that the parent and child could work through because dementia is different for everybody. So that I would do some very basic explanations on what dementia was and then it would be a workbook type thing that they could make specific to their particular issue. For eg a question might be ‘What does Granny do that’s silly?’ For different Grannies it might be something different. So if it was going to the bathroom and getting lost then the child and parent could explore that and come up with what the problems were, how they felt about it, they could draw a picture, they could write sentences and they could even problem solve around how they could help and that would often make the children feel much better.
What’s the expected outcome?
It’s still very much a work in progress. I’m hoping to evaluate it in terms of
- Does it actually have an effect on the residents?
- Does it have an effect on the children?
- Does it increase the number of children who come visiting?
- Do they maintain their visits longer?
- Do they come more often?
- and look at how it affects the staff as well. Children are a normal part of life and… normalize the care for them a little bit more.