Researchers Plan Dementia Training Program - The University of Iowa College of Nursing

Researchers Plan Dementia Training Program

Researchers at The University of Iowa College of Nursing and the Iowa Geriatric Education Center in the UI Carver College of Medicine have secured a two-year grant of $148,346 from the Retirement Research Foundation for a project titled “Dementia Training to Promote Involvement in Meaningful Activity.”

Principal investigator, Kathleen Buckwalter, the Sally Mathis Hartwig Distinguished Professor of Gerontological Nursing and director of the Hartford Center of Geriatric Nursing Excellence in the College of Nursing, Marianne Smith, assistant professor of nursing, and Linda Seydel, administrator, Iowa Geriatric Education Center, submitted the grant proposal to create a three-hour CD-ROM program to train health practitioners on the use of activity-based interventions which are personalized to the individual with dementia.

UI collaborators on the project include Kristin Johnson, Editor, Iowa Geriatric Education Center; Susan Lenoch, Office of Consultation and Research in Medical Education, UI College of Medicine; David Reed, UI College of Nursing statistician; and Toni Tripp-Reimer, professor and associate dean for research at the UI College of Nursing.

This CD training program will be available to nursing homes in the state of Iowa to deliver training to nurses, social workers, and licensed therapy professional, as well as assistive personnel. The goal is to teach activity-based interventions that are personalized for each individual and are useable by all team members on a day-to-day basis.

The program will assist nursing homes by providing training to comply with recently revised government regulations from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The training program is built on interventions from Dementia Practice Guideline for Recreational Therapy by nursing and recreation therapist researchers Linda Buettner, Co-Principal investigator, and Suzanne Fitzsimmons, both from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

July 19, 2007