Hi, my name is Denise Scruggs. I’m the Director of Education at the National Council of Certified Dementia Practitioners and today I’d like to share with you a quote from Dr. Maria Montessori who is the founder of the Montessori Method in education which was later applied to long-term care and memory care. Her quote is “what you do for me, you take away from me.” and what’s so important about this quote is it’s the cornerstone also of person-centered care. That we give a person a chance to be who they are and to still take care of themselves and to to live life at their optimal level. When we take away their ability to dress and bathe and we jump in and we become overly helpful they lose that ability to keep working with that task. We also know too that when we do that we affect their self-confidence and sometimes their life satisfaction. Wo we want to keep our loved ones with dementia active as much as possible and engaged in the things they’ve always enjoyed. There are number of ways that we can help our loved ones before doing something for them. We can show them how to do it, they’re demonstrating it. We can give them instructions one at a time and they have them completed part of the task and then we once they’ve done that we show them the next part and the next part and we just tear it down piece by piece. So the next time you’re faced with a situation of someone that you love needing a little help, or a lot of help, ask yourself what can they do first and give them a chance to do it before you jump in.
