Dementia Patient Care and Nutrition Training
Specialized Training to improve Senior Health and Safety
We are very proud to be working with caring and compassionate Caregivers who have joined our growing workforce. We are also grateful to partner with industry professionals and businesses who regularly train and work with our staff as well as our client families.
Westchester Family Care Inc. (WFC) is an award-winning Home Care Agency assisting people of all ages by customizing home care plans to maintain a healthy quality of life and safety at home.
We reach out to specialists to enrich client-centric services that go beyond our essential offerings, in keeping with our core value to improve the lives of our employees and the people in our care. WFC engages professionals to assist with training and coaching for our caregivers and families.
"A lot of what I do with our home heath care team is to help them understand what these barriers and challenges are and to prepare them for it."
Nutritional Counseling for Senior Dietary Requirements
Nutritional Counseling: Jenna Saidel Lebovich, MS, RDN, CDN
Pictured to the left is our outside Nutritionist, Jenna, conducting a cooking demonstration for clinical, office staff, and caregivers. This hands-on training is key to providing solutions to any barriers our workforce may have about maintaining proper nutrition.
Jenna handles the barriers and challenges by giving our staff a toolkit to prepare themselves for any situation they may encounter with clients. These include dealing with difficulties clients may have toward cooking, such as:
- Medical and or physical issues.
- Dietary limitations due to medical conditions.
- Decreased sense of taste or smell, a normal progression of aging.
The basic ingredients to nutritional training include proactive exposure of caregivers to critical aspects of food handling, essential food preparation, and implementation of different dietary requirements such as learning to flavor without salt.
Jenna stresses the importance of understanding nutrition using the different diets required by our client population as context. Caregivers subsequently become empowered to deal with WFC clients’ specific dietary needs and do the actual cooking in their homes.
On the client-side, this training often has Jenna working directly with multi-generational family members. For instance, a grandmother in the family chain used to play a matriarchal role by preparing family meals and holiday cooking. Now, Grandma has had to give up cooking altogether due to aging or maladies like arthritis or cognitive disabilities.
Basic Ingredients to Nutritional Training: Food Handling, Food Preparation, Implementation of Diet Necessities
Jenna steps in by going directly into the family household and arbitrating with the grandmother’s adult children or grandchildren to recover the exact tastes Grandma used to deliver. This again involves learning about the family’s cooking history and dietary needs, such as low sodium or preparing a diabetes-friendly menu. A customized food handling and preparation program is then put into action for the family caregivers.
Specialists to Address Cognitive Challenges
Dementia Coaching: Donna Sangi-Vallario, MS
A significant portion of WFC’s clients have a cognitive disorder like Dementia or Alzheimer’s. WFC’s Dementia Coach, Donna, comes in regularly to train caregivers with her pragmatic advice on how to treat the client. Her teachings center around being competent, knowledgeable, and respectful.
We use our partnering with Donna to specifically coach HHA’s on different techniques to assist cognitively challenged clients. As Donna advises: “The reality is the disease is increasing with no cure in sight. We have to train our care partners to go in, think out of the box, and manage these challenging behaviors. They can’t do it alone.”Continual monthly interactions between Donna and our caregivers allow her to listen and offer concrete approaches to handle difficult client situations.
Since Donna began her monthly supportive participation in our training workshops, she has been able to offer concrete interventions that the HHA’s utilize.
Some cases warrant Donna visiting the client families for her assessment and then offering family members individualized coaching. Often, with our Dementia clients, the more involved the coached family member, the greater the need for Donna’s in-depth skill set on handling Dementia.
Donna reports that WFC is different from other home care agencies because families feel comfortable being honest about their loved one’s challenging behaviors. Instead of being fearful of relating the full extent of their loved one’s symptoms, Donna observes that “When they call WFC, their staff is comfortable in asking for what Mom or Dad needs. They’re specifically trained in the field of Dementia.”