Category: Innovative Models

Malton Village, Peel Region, the Toronto Star, June 23, 2018

Imagine living in a long-term care home with 8 to 12 people where the focus of care is on people and relies on emotional intelligence, the ability to understand another person’s feelings and respond with compassion. There are no task sheets such as the bath list, mobility list, or activity list. Activities are not scripted but rather there is a natural flow towards individual interests. People are helping to set the dining room table, peel potatoes, fold laundry, music is playing and laughter can be heard. Those with memory loss are allowed to live in their moments, which some may call humane dishonesty.

This is what is happening on the Redstone Dementia Unit at Malton Village. An elderly woman with dementia thinks she is 10 years old and is calling for her mother.  The Butterfly Model approach is to try and understand what the woman is seeking. Is it comfort, love, or reassurance and if so the Butterfly program says give that to her instead of the truth. Another person, who doesn’t understand why the staff member wants to change his briefs, gets scared and defensive. His hand balls into a fist. With the emotion-based care approach, in this situation the staff member recognizes that the person is scared and decides to give him a big hug then says, let’s go to the toilet. They walk arm in arm down the hallway. More information can be found in “The Fix: Part 3”, The Toronto Star, June 23, 2018 which was republished in the Special Section: Crisis of Care, The Toronto Star, February 7, 2021.

The emotion-based approach to care is a learned approach and it takes time for staff to adapt to this new way of caring for and about those living in their home. Giving hugs, hand-holding, sitting down and spending time listening to those living in the home is the norm. And meeting the person where they are at becomes more important than telling the truth.

Please support Transformative Culture Change in Ontario’s Long-Term Care Homes by sending an email to info@LTCcommission-CommissionSLD.ca or to your local MPP  https://www.ola.org/en/members/current.

#ChangeLTCNow

Over the past 15 years the Toronto Star and other Ontario newspapers have written many stories about life in long-term care homes. Yes there are good stories to be told, but what we remember are those stories about neglect, abuse, urine-soaked sheets, loneliness or angry, aggressive incidents.

There is no-one among us that doesn’t abhor reading these awful stories and wonder how we are letting these incidents happen; regrettably it has taken the pandemic to bring the seriousness of the long-term care home situation to the forefront.

Most of the staff are trying their very best to deliver care according to what is expected of them. But is this the problem? “Is keeping our elderly clean, fed and safely tucked away” the best way to provide a quality of life?

In a recent article in the Toronto Star, we read stories about residents who live in LTC homes which have undergone transformative culture change. There is Inga who asks for a piece of toast, butters it and shares it with another resident. Or the Professor who is known for his crankiness, who starts to cry when hymns and wartime songs are played on the piano. And then all of a sudden, begins singing the words to these songs! Read more here from a recent article called Crisis of Care, The Toronto Star, February 7, 2021: The Fix: Part 2: Republished from 2018).

The good news is that where there is a willingness to change, lives are transformed. There is no excuse not to now. We know how much we have dreaded the traditional model of nursing care. We know, now, how much better a different model can be, and how joy, respect and community can actually be experienced by residents, families and staff.  If the word “care” in our system of healthcare means anything, we need to get on with it.

Please support Transformative Culture Change in Ontario’s Long-Term Care Homes by sending an email to info@LTCcommission-CommissionSLD.ca or to your local MPP  https://www.ola.org/en/members/current.

#ChangeLTCNow

There are over 78,000 people living in one of 630 long-term care homes in Ontario. These homes are controlled by more than 300 regulations that keep staff focused on the tasks of feeding, scheduling, and cleaning, all documented for government collection. Every day, at least 60 minutes is spent by staff filing ministry updates. They tap icons for mood, mobility, meals, bowel movements but there are no icons for laughter, conversation, human touch or sense of purpose.  It is a detached, antiseptic end to life which some have called a culture of malignancy.

A long-term care home in Peel has moved away from a traditional model of care and took a gamble on fun, kindness and affection. It is Malton Village in Mississauga and they are focusing on laughter, friendship, energy, tenderness, freedom and hope. That is not to say that they are not meeting the Ministry regulations. They are doing that but in a different model of care. In a recent article in the Toronto Star, we read about Bill, a resident, who has been kicked out of multiple long-term care homes because of violent tendencies, until he arrived in a Butterfly home. He became docile, enjoyed his days and staff came to know him as a “lovely man”. Or there is the dietary aide who helps Roger with his dessert. She talks to him about her childhood memories visiting peach groves and before you know it, Roger has eaten all of his dessert. Read more here from a recent article called Crisis of Care, The Toronto Star, February 7, 2021: The Fix: Part 1: Republished from 2018).

Do we want our seniors to live out their days in long-term care homes that dehumanize their existence? We can help to change this by transforming our long-term care homes into innovative models of care such as the Butterfly model of care. Please support Transformative Culture Change in Ontario’s Long-Term Care Homes by sending an email to info@LTCcommission-CommissionSLD.ca or to your local MPP  https://www.ola.org/en/members/current.

#ChangeLTCNow!

Congratulations to Henley Place Home in London, Ontario for receiving its Butterfly Model of Care accreditation in December 2020. It joins Henley House in St. Catharines, Ontario which received it accreditation in December 2019.

When will other long-term care home providers rise to the challenge and begin to implement innovative models?

Kudos to Primacare Living Solutions, the provider of these homes for their leadership in implementing transformative culture change in their homes. And yes, more to come – Primacare has a third home (Burton Manor in Brampton, ON) currently undergoing Butterfly accreditation that should be completed in the fall 2021.

Please advocate for change by contacting your local councillor, your MPP, or organizations urging them to bring this change to your community.

Here is an update on the exciting journey that Bonnechere Manor and Miramichi Lodge have begun in the implementation of the Butterfly model.

The Butterfly approach was pioneered over 20 years ago in the United Kingdom by Dementia Care Matters and over the past year or so has been adopted or emulated in a few long-term care homes in Ontario. It is a social model of care that shifts care from a traditional medical care approach to:
• Prioritising emotional care that is person centered
• Creating busy, filled up, engaging places that feel like ‘home’
• Providing relaxed, freed up comfortable environments
• Involving people in the running of their own home
• Emphasizing a more informal, best friends and family like approach.

Miramichi will start by focusing on a unit of 27 people and at Bonnechere Manor, a unit of 20 people. Eventually the Butterfly approach will be used throughout both homes.

“Long-term care homes are not a place where people go to stay; they are places where people go to live and that at the heart of long-term care must be family, friends, and community”.  Read more here.

Kudos to Renfrew County! Let’s hope that more long-term care homes will see the benefits of adopting an innovative approach to care.

Please forward this to others who may be interested and if you are on social media, share on your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter accounts.

Making Moments Matter at The Glebe Centre:   

No More Beige! 

An update from the Glebe Centre (Ottawa) :  Although the team from Meaningful Care Matters (formerly Dementia Care Matters) observed many exceptional moments of care, there were indeed areas that needed improvement and did not follow a person-centered model of care.

This will be our journey over the next year, to transform and re-think care on Bankwood (one of the care units at the Center) from a neutral/task based model of care to a person-centered, house-hold model of care.

Meaningful Care Matters has sent an extensive, formal report with recommendations on making meaningful change.

An audit was completed on the physical space on Bankwood and recommendations for change and transformation.  Over the last few months we have started to create a relaxed home-like feel to the day with less task orientated activities and more emphasis on the people living and working on Bankwood.

We have begun the process to re-design Bankwood to be more welcoming and intimate, filling the house with the “stuff of life” so that residents can connect with a variety of colours and objects that reflect their past lives, work and hobbies.  And staff training begins this month!

Person-centered care is front and foremost as Bankwood undergoes change and transformation!  Please forward this blog post to at least one other contact you know who may be interested.

And please encourage others to become followers by clicking on the button on the right hand side of this post.

Two years after we featured several blog posts on the Butterfly home initiative at Malton Village in the Peel Region, there are now some very exciting results:

• A 75% decrease in staff sick time resulting in continuity of care and huge cost savings;
• a decrease from 39%-10% of residents exhibiting symptoms of depression;
• a decrease in antipsychotic use by those without a diagnosis of psychosis 40% (‘17) to 8% (‘19);
• anticipation that the implementation will end up being cost neutral after 3 years.

Merrilee Fullerton, Minister of Long-term Care, meets with resident in Renfrew County.

And now on October 9^th, 2019, both Bonnechere Manor and Miramichi Lodge Long-term Care Homes in Renfrew County began a journey to turn a dementia unit into a Butterfly Home.  “The transition will include significant environmental changes such as smaller more home-like ‘neighbourhoods’ versus units. This would mean for example converting a dementia unit where currently 20 residents reside into two (2) smaller neighbourhoods of 10.  Other environmental changes will include redesigning the dementia units to be more welcoming and intimate, and filling the household with the ‘stuff of life’ so that residents can connect with a variety of colours, textures and objects that reflect their past lives, work and hobbies.”  For full media release, click here.

Way to go Renfrew County for being another champion for culture change!

Contact your MPPs and City Councilors to let them know about these new developments and that we need to invest in more innovation in our long-term care homes.  Let’s keep the momentum going!

 

 

The Glebe Centre, a non-profit, charitable long-term care home, has partnered with Dementia Care Matters to become the first Butterfly Home in Ottawa. The Butterfly Model is a transformative model of care for long-term care homes that means:

• Total culture change
• More than addressing the clinical needs of the residents
• A place where residents, families and staff form a community of care,
• Relationships matter most and
• Where residents’ preferences for daily activities are respected

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”.  R. Buckminster Fuller

The Glebe Centre has done just that and seized the opportunity to be the leader for transformative change for our long-term care homes in Ottawa. They will start with one unit in the fall of 2019.  This is a bold and risky step and we offer our hearty congratulations!

Now to get other cities like Brantford, Kingston, Belleville to follow suit.