The Engaging and Communicating with People Who Have Dementia. An Evolution of Meaning, Understanding and Public Perception.

Keep people with dementia fully engaged in daily life and help them maximize remaining functional skills by tapping into their innate abilities and interests. Engaging and Communicating with People Who Have Dementia is a trove of advice on how to identify people's strengths and preferences and then use this knowledge to improve activity programming, communication, and functional independence. Individualizing activities, interactions, or interventions at any moment of the day is made easy with the many helpful suggestions offered throughout the pages of this innovative guide. Here are keys to successfully choosing leisure activities for individuals that emphasize their previous interests and talents as well as current capabilities. Includes these valuable assessment and intervention tools: • Informal Geriatric Strength-Based Inventory • Caregiver Questionnaire and Checklist • Personal Preferences Inventory • Strength-Based Summary Form • Dementia Care Staff Guide • Memory Loss Caregiver Guide • SIMPLE (Simplified Inventory of Multiple Potential and Leisure Engagement) Based on the principles of multiple intelligences, this resource provides handy assessment forms and instructive explanations and examples to help uncover and then build on each person's unique abilities. Abundant activity ideas are showcased for each type of intelligence―linguistic, logical, visual, tactile, auditory, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic―plus strategies for adapting them as a person's abilities decline. Features that make this resource especially useful for enriching person-centered programming, include advice on available technologies that enhance communication, promote independence, and stimulate cognition guidelines for matching activities to early, middle and late stages of dementia valuable assessment tools for use by staff, family, and the individual downloadable, reusable forms Activity professionals, nursing staff, speech-language pathologists, and even family caregivers can help maintain meaningful and enjoyable interactions with an adult diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease using this strength-based approach.

Eileen Eisner, M.Ed., CCC-SLP, is a consultant specializing in communication disorders related to Alzheimer's disease as well as language-learning disorders in school-age children. She provides staff training and has published books and articles on practical intervention strategies for adults who have neurodegenerative dementias.