Right at Home Chattanooga's Caregivers Receive Dementia Live® Training

What is Dementia Live®?

Dementia Live® is an experience that immerses participants into what life might be like living with cognitive impairment and sensory change. Utilizing specialized gear that simulates dementia specific changes that include altered eyesight, hearing and tactile sensation, this safe experience is a powerful and effective tool to strengthen care partner understanding of and empathy for clients. Gaining a first-hand understanding of anxiety, isolation, frustration, confusion, and more, Dementia Live uniquely walks participants from the “AHA” moment to empowering care partners with tools to improve communication, care processes, relationship building and the environment.

Right at Home Chattanooga is a Dementia Live Certified Provider and recently completed several training sessions with about 30 of our caregivers in the Dementia Live experiential, immersive learning program. Caregivers make their way through ADL (activities of daily living) tasks with sensory limiting apparatus in order to approximate some of the common experiences of seniors living with Alzheimer's, dementia, or other cognitive decline. Following, we spend time debriefing with the caregivers about how they "felt" trying to perform the tasks. Also, they are encouraged to reflect on times in their caregiving experience where the Dementia Live program would have changed how they responded to a client circumstance, or given them a greater empathy for the client, with whom they were working.