Enriching the Environment

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Chapter 4: Enriching the Environment

Overview:

• Describes the typical lifestyle of many people with dementia
• Explains typical nurses’ perspectives of the lifestyles of people with dementia
• Provides strategies for improving the standard of living of patients with dementia including story-telling, affection and more

Description:

This chapter begins with an exposé of the everyday environments of care units as experienced by many people with dementia, and follows with a discussion of how and why such inappropriate and inadequate environments continue to exist. The chapter then discusses how practice can be transformed, how environments can be enriched, and how meaning can be restored to the lives of people with dementia.

Topics:

• The everyday lived world
• The nurses’ perspective
• Transforming practice
  • Returning to traditional values
  • An alternative framework for nursing practice
• Implementing enriched environments
  • Simple and more complex strategies
• Being of their world
  • Story-telling
  • A playful attitude
  • Sounds and aromatic massage
  • Respect and affection
  • Making use of facilities

Speaker / Author:

Dr Kim Wylie
Kim Wylie is a general and mental health nurse with extensive experience in the care of older people. Kim holds a bachelor’s degree in health sciences and a master’s degree in nursing, the latter involving a phenomenological study of the lived experience of busy-ness for aged-care nurses. Kim also holds diplomas in community health and gerontology. In 1993, she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship and spent three months studying innovative practice in dementia care internationally. In 1997 and 1998, she returned to the United Kingdom to undertake training in dementia care mapping with the Bradford Dementia Group, and in 2001 she presented the keynote address at the Alzheimer Society Conference of Washington (USA).

Kim’s PhD involved a critical evaluation of the outcomes of enriched sensory environments for people with dementia, and the material presented in this chapter is largely taken from that thesis (Wylie 2000). She is currently employed as the senior nurse educator at Calvary Retirement Community, Cessnock (New South Wales, Australia).

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