The Virtual Dementia Tour® will take you from the beginning to the late stages of the dementia disease process, allowing you to experience the difficulties of day to day living for someone with dementia.  Participants will be performing tasks and exercises that are essential for professionals, caregivers and family members to experience.  

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Connelly Law Offices, Ltd. and Continuum Hospice and Palliative Care of Rhode Island will provide professionally trained staff to facilitate this program, free of charge, as part of a comprehensive training event at your facility for your staff, administration and family members of residents.

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Once a person takes the Tour, they are more aware of how to provide “person-centered-care” to those with dementia because they have just experienced what those with dementia are living with every day. This personal experience allows participants to examine how they would like to be treated and encourages them to use their experience as the example by which they treat people with dementia.

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The VDT isn’t just the experience; it’s also an in-depth debrief session to help staff understand why some residents have difficult behavior. In-services are interactive and allow the staff to discuss their experience while learning the clinical reasons for the way they behaved.

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Once they have walked in the shoes of a person with cognitive decline, staff state that they will be more patient, understanding, less hurried, more sensitive to what is going on around the resident, among other things. Even simply turning on more lights, turning off the TV, turning on music and cutting down on loud abrupt noise make all the difference to a person with dementia, and staff become more aware of these easy strategies after the experience.