The Memory Care Innovation program is designed to recognize passionate and innovative industry members who are shaping the future of cognitive care across behavioral health, home health and home care, hospice and palliative care, senior housing, and skilled nursing. To see this year’s inaugural Memory Care Innovation Award winners, visit https://innovation.memorycarebusiness.com/.
Jane Yousey, the director of learning and development at FirstLight Home Care, has been named a 2024 Memory Care Innovation Award Winner.
To become a Memory Care Innovation Award winner, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who knows how to put vision into action, and serve as an advocate for those living with memory-related disorders and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.
Yousey sat down with Home Health Care News to talk about why she believes people with dementia don’t seek a diagnosis sooner, and creating treatment that currently does not exist.
What drew you to working in memory care?
As a geriatric occupational therapist, my entire career I’ve loved working with people whose brains are changing due to either dementia, or mental illness. I have spent a career developing techniques and tools and training to equip people who care for them to do it better.
What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in memory care?
I have to go directly to my personal experience with it. My mom passed, about a year and half ago, having really journeyed for the last 10 years, with a couple of different forms of dementia.
My grandmother lived with us with Alzheimer’s disease. My biggest takeaway is, when we care for the client with dementia, we care for the family at the same time. Everybody needs support, understanding and tools to be able to journey along this pathway of dementia.
If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of memory care, what would it be?
We have to close the loop of equipping people to get a diagnosis as early as possible. The reason people don’t is because there isn’t a treatment at this point. There are some interesting infusions that are in development, but I think the number one reason why people don’t want to get a diagnosis is it feels a lot like a hopeless situation.
My number one is that we would develop a treatment that would be effective in not only slowing, but stopping the process, then people would feel like it’s safe to get an accurate diagnosis, because then they can start treatment.
Number two, the number of available beds in communities and facilities for people needing memory care support are going to fill up. In the next four to five years, there will not be available beds.
We need to equip people to be at home with wraparound care for what they need. I think home is the best place to age surrounded by memories, photos and items that they value, familiarity routines and long-term procedural memories that get triggered at home, whether it’s their garden or their golf clubs or a tool collection or a teacup collection. We also have to equip communities to be dementia ready, so that a coffee shop, or a diner wait staff understands how to best approach and support someone’s independence, for as long as possible, with dementia.
What is the biggest obstacle to being innovative in memory care, and how do you try to overcome that obstacle?
The stigma is number one. People think all hope is gone when you get a diagnosis of dementia, and it’s not. My curriculum, my training is a curriculum of hope.
Our company is called FirstLight, so we’re often the first light shining hope in a home of someone who may be experiencing this journey of dementia.
There’s three things we teach in our training program: We adapt our communication to exactly where someone is in their stage of dementia. We adapt their activities in a day to allow them to be successful. The other thing we teach is adapting to the environment, people have visual spatial changes.
A perfect example of this is when you set a meal up for someone with late-stage dementia. Their world is really only 14 to 18 inches from their face. If their water glass, or the salt and pepper or the utensils are further away from their face recognition, their spatial world, it doesn’t exist. It’s like it’s not there.
In a word, how would you describe the future of memory care?
Hopeful
If you could give advice to yourself looking back to your first day in the industry, what would it be and why?
Create what has not yet been created.
