Core Course: Alzheimer's & Memory Care

This course covers essential knowledge areas you need for caring for a person with Alzheimer’s or memory loss, including understanding the disease process, learning daily care skills and how to communicate with the person who can no longer understand the world around him or her. Topics covered include:

• The different terms for memory loss, and what they all mean
• Causes of memory loss
• How you can be sure of a diagnosis
• What can be done to help someone with memory loss
• What someone with dementia might experience
• How to use more emotional language, and paint pictures with your words
• How to understand and explain the progress of a disease like Alzheimer's Disease
• How important non-verbal communication is to the person with dementia
• Basic principals of communication which can make everyone’s life easier
• Special ways to communicate caring and affection to people who don’t seen to understand anything anymore
• How body language communicates, whether you know it or not
• Self-awareness to improve all aspects of communication
• Why daily care tasks are so challenging or people with dementia
• How to take the fear and difficulty out of these once-simple daily skills
• How to help the person with dementia stay as independent as possible, for as long as possible, a goal everyone has How to get a person to bath or do another seemingly impossible task, and keep your cool
• How to problem-solve challenges in daily care on your own in the future
  

• Idaho Board of Examiners of Residential Care Administrators have approved the Program of Care in the area of Alzheimer’s and Memory Care.