Designing Environments that Foster Support in Senior Living: Activities Edition

How do we provide a supportive environment for seniors living with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease or a related type of dementia? Compassionate caregiving starts with intentions for providing a safe and nurturing space to care for our patients, clients, residents and loved ones, but let’s dive into some action steps we can take to help tailor our interactions and environments to foster support.

First Up: Developing and offering engaging activities and enrichment opportunities!

Active engagement is a significant factor in reducing cognitive decline and in creating a warm, welcoming, positive environment where residents and loved ones can thrive!

BUT REMEMBER- activities that have a high level of difficulty might spark frustration rather than joy. For a senior living with dementia who struggles with cognitive tasks like number recognition and recall or who’s fine motor skills have regressed, BINGO might be highly frustrating and confusing. People are yelling out loud which might be overwhelming and startling. There’s numbers that have to be heard clearly which might be difficult for a senior with hearing loss. You have to find the number on your card which might be a struggle for someone who has visual impairments or difficulty with number recognition. And you have to use a chip or dot marker to cover those numbers which might hurt if you have arthritis in your hands.

Consider, instead some low demand/high reward, functional activities that mirror hobbies and home/professional tasks seniors would have done prior in life. Cookie or cake decorating and table setting or even laundry might be perfect and enjoyable activities and tasks for a senior who devoted their life to homemaking, cooking, or child rearing! Gardening combines the reinforcement of a previous hobby with the opportunity to get much needed fresh air, vitamin D, and a change of environment!

Use Life Stations as part of activity time! Don’t just set up stations and leave them. Plan to spend time in these activity areas. Go to the mock nursery area and play with the baby dolls. Have a “women’s event” at the makeup/dressing table station, or even in the community salon, and try on different hats, don faux jewelry, have a manicure party. Using these spaces in a planned way during activity times on the enrichment calendar help to teach and reinforce the use and availability of these stations for residents. Many residents won’t use the stations independently if they haven’t been explicitly told that they are available of if they are unsure how to interact with the items in these spaces!

Enrichment opportunities should be varied, offering different types of activities to engage, cognitively, physically, & creatively. But they should also be preferred activities of the residents! Selecting activities that meet their needs, like to “cook” or help set the table, make them highly rewarding! Remember it’s about what THEY enjoy.

Comment below with YOUR favorite enrichment activity!