Creating Home-like Environments

Summary

We'll present a summary of a year of True Doors and Sensory-scapes projects in long term care homes throughout Ontario. You'll hear from the homes themselves on why they sought to transform the physical environment and what the results have been.

Register

Wednesday, June 29, 12:30-13:00 EST

All registrants receive a recording of the session and a package of inspiring ideas and examples of projects.

Webinar outline

Creating homes

Design is one of the least understood and underexploited areas in the toolkit for helping elders to feel at home in long-term care. Too often, decorating memory care is treated as an afterthought or nice-to-have, sporadically adding a landscape mural, a few old pieces of furniture, pictures, or decals for diversion.

The result is a missed opportunity to help everyone involved in long-term care feel more comfortable and meaningfully engaged with the environment every single moment of every day.

Using project examples from our first year of cooperation, True Doors and Sensory-scapes will shine a light on the principles of dignified dementia design, as well as the use of innovative design and creativity to create a cohesive sensory experience.

Customer Experiences

Joining us are representatives from two Ontario-based homes who will share their experience of the effects of True Doors and Sensory-scapes:

• Leanne Daniels, Director of Programs & Services, The Wexford Residence
  Toronto, Ontario
• Melissa Darling, Director of Resident Programs, Fieldstone Commons
  Sienna Senior Living, Scarborough, Ontario

We will end with a short Q&A.

Following the webinar, we will share a package of inspiring ideas and examples for further orientation and reference.

Speakers

Katherine Hirsch

Owner, Sensory-scapes

Kathy discovered Multi-Sensory Environments (MSE) while working as a Special Education Consultant for the Waterloo Region District School Board. While on a field trip to one of the first Snoezelen Rooms in Ontario, Kathy was amazed and intrigued by the immediate positive engagement her cognitively impaired students had with the sensory environment.

Convinced her students would benefit from a Multi-Sensory room of their own, Kathy began researching sensory integration. She worked diligently to raise the funds, educate administration, design a room for her students and incorporate sensory interventions into their programs. The positive experiences in her first “school age” sensory room motivated her to bring the benefits of sensory stimulation to older users… seniors living in Long Term Care living with Dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease.

Twenty years later Kathy is still learning more about the positive impacts of sensory integrations, and works to share this knowledge to front line staff caring for seniors. She has assisted all ages (from 5 months to 101 years) and all abilities of people, in schools, long term care homes, adult day programs and hospitals using Multi-Sensory Integration.

Katherine has a degree in Deaf-Blind Intervention and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Sciences from Wilfrid Laurier University. Kathy is a certified Snoezelen trainer and has taught workshops in Sensory Integration and Alzheimer’s care at George Brown College, and the Waterloo Wellington Alzheimer’s Society.

Rahzeb Choudhury

Co-Founder and Executive Director, True Doors

Rahzeb is the founder of the platform company Lifelong Inspiration, which focuses on advancing person-centredness in commerce and society through strategy and technology solutions consulting and product or service development. In long-term care, Lifelong Inspiration is most well known for True Doors®, decals help that improve the lives of people with dementia. True Doors began as a social art and life story project and is now a respected brand adopted from Tasmania to Vancouver.

Rahzeb has been a London city banker, market trend analyst, and globe-trotting language technology entrepreneur. He and his family are based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.