Press Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 2003

WELLSPRING PROGRAM WINS PRESTIGIOUS QUALITY AWARD FROM LIFESPAN

Baltimore, MD.-Brightview Senior Living currently has four assisted living sites in Maryland-in Bel Air
Catonsville, White Marsh, and Timonium. Each Brightview community has a special area set aside for residents with Alzheimer's and other forms of memory impairment. This special area is called Wellspring Village. Here, memory impaired residents have a safe, secure area in which to enjoy life. Each Wellspring Village includes a Wellspring garden, accessible from one or more points within the Village. The garden is a place for residents to wander, enjoy scented herbs, or garden. The Wellspring program has been extremely successful in reducing behavioral issues among memory impaired residents, improving quality of life for residents, bringing peace and renewal to family members, and enhancing staff professional satisfaction. The oldest Wellspring program was established in 1999 at Brightview of Bel Air, the newest, in 2002 at Brightview Catonsville. Since 1999, Wellspring has helped hundred of residents and family members deal with the unique aging issues associated with memory impairment.

Evolution of the Approach
Conventional wisdom has been that a highly structured, somewhat inflexible day program has maximum therapeutic benefit to those suffering from Alzheimer's and similar age-and disease-related dementia. Both researchers and practitioners have argued that change in routine causes unnecessary confusion and uncertainty, which in turn acerbate behavioral problems. Programs that use this approach are characterized by a highly structured, routinized series of activities that don't vary much from day to day and which are thought to provide a reassuringly familiar pattern. Basically, in this model, the resident is asked to fit into the activities structure.

A Different Approach
After several decades of watching the successes and failures of the highly structured approach to dementia care, many practitioners are now advocating a more open program of daily activities. When Brightview was developing its clinical program model, we decided to base our dementia care program on the more open, transaction-based model. Essentially, our Wellspring program is designed to foster a self-regulating series of behavior-based feedback loops between the resident and the staff, resident and visiting family members, and staff and family members. This dialectic of transaction-based programming means that essentially there is the potential for 24-hour programming. The residents-individually or in combination-make a request (either verbal or behaviorally); the staff responds in a nourishing, understanding way. The effect of the response on the resident is observed and the respond pattern modified accordingly. Later, the staff will review the results of various interactions with the family, seeking both to share and to understand in order to validate. This approach requires more staff and a different caliber of staff than the more structured traditional programs. The ratio of staff members to residents is very high in a Wellspring Village. Plus, every Village has a "mayor," a full-time dedicated director.

Spontaneity & Independence
One consequent of the approach used in Wellspring is that schedules of daily activities are not always rigorously adhered to. Activities often arise spontaneously, at the suggestion of one or more residents. Or activities can change at a moment's notice. If, for example, a staff member suggests a game of bingo and the residents don't want to play bingo, then, rather than forcing residents to abide by the scheduled activity, residents are asked what they want to do-and that suggestion is usually acted on and becomes the activity of the moment. The spontaneity allowed for by this approach seems to have a very calming and therapeutic effect on the residents. The control residents have over the content of their activities is one way of fostering their sense of dignity.

A Place to Live, Not Hide
Through the dialectic of interactions, Wellspring Village becomes a place to live, not a place to hide. Often, the staff or the residents-who have not severed their contact with life-suggest trips to a favorite local eatery or movie theater. Such suggestions by residents are taken seriously by the staff and acted on whenever possible. Residents are not cut off from the community of everyday life just because they live in a Wellspring Village.

Staff is Key
Selecting the right staff is critical to making a transaction-based program work. Equally important is the training the staff receives before and during the job. All Wellspring staff members are trained for three days in the concepts behind our treatment approach before they are allowed to interact with residents. Each staff member has a more experienced mentor among his or her coworkers. And continuing education is provided on a routine basis, often in conjunction with one of our partners, St. Joseph's Medical Center and Shepard-Pratt Health System.

Family Member Focus
We also recognize that family members are in great pain. Watching a parent or other loved one suffer the ravages of Alzheimer's disease is distressful and is often denied. Having to put a parent into residential care is often seen by a family member as an admission of failure and induces severe guilt. Our staff works with the family to help them understand the disease and our treatment approach so that they can become a helpful and creative part of the treatment dialectic. One of the favorite stories in the Wellspring mythos concerns the daughter who, upon learning that the residents, including her mother, were taking dance lessons, laughed and said: "Nonsense, my mother will never dance again." Several weeks later when she had a chance to observe her mother dancing, she immediately admitted: "I guess I underestimated my Mother." Our staff always assumes residents "can do."

Discharge
Folks reside in Wellspring Village until they can no longer benefit from the process. Usually that occurs when the resident requires round the clock skilled nursing care, which cannot be provided in Wellspring.

Proof Points
The support for this positioning is not clinical outcome data. Instead, support for the benefits our approach are the stories individual family members can tell about the changes they've seen in their loved ones and in their own lives as a result of selecting Wellspring.

Read first hand accounts of how Wellspring has enhanced the lives of residents, staff and family members

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