South Arkansas Center on Aging offers specialized caregiver training
EL DORADO — The South Arkansas Center on Aging Education Center offers services in eight counties that educate family members who care for loved ones and emphasizes caring for those living with dementia.
Based in the Armstrong Building on Main Street in El Dorado, certified dementia practitioners work to improve the quality of life for older adults by providing clinical expertise and educational services for health care professionals and their families for south Arkansas.
The center’s administrative coordinator Katy Canright works with other certified dementia practitioners to provide these services.
“We’ve got family caregiver workshops (for) people that are caring for loved ones with dementia, cancer or Parkinson’s to help and support those caregivers,” Canright said. “They’re unpaid and working themselves. They’re just caring out of love so we offer some free workshops that aren’t as long as our certified classes.”
The interactive workshops last for six hours and focus on dementia itself, how it affects the brain and how to communicate with loved ones with dementia.
“We spend a lot of time helping people understand what’s happening in the brain, how to live in understanding and change your expectations of that person you’re caring for, realizing that there are still many moments of joy and very positive things that can still happen even as the disease progresses,” she said.
Taking care of a loved one living with dementia may be tough, but there are tools a caregiver can get from a workshop, Canright said.
“Every person with dementia is different. In different stages of dementia, there are different activities you can do to help that person maintain their dignity and help you maintain your sanity as a caregiver because it can get overwhelming,” the certified dementia practitioner said.
The center hosts support groups for people taking care of loved ones with dementia, but Canright said the practitioners want to do more.
“We’re really trying to gear a lot of our services in the coming years on caregiver support, focusing a little bit more on caring for people living with Alzheimer’s or dementia,” she said. “Dr. (Angela) Norman is very active on the state level with the efforts that UAMS and other medical partners (have to) address the dementia issue. It’s an epidemic, a silent one that a lot of people don’t really know about because it’s not a visible disease.”
There are other issues, including the well-being of caregivers, that affect the dementia healthcare field as well, Canright said.
“Until they find a cure, caregivers may put their loved ones in a nursing home when they don’t want to because they’re burnt out or the nursing homes are full of patients because the caregivers’ health deteriorates so much that they can’t care for them anymore,” she said.
To combat this, the South Arkansas Center on Aging Education Center started the SUCCESS program that provides one-on-one counseling that includes four, free sessions for caregivers who take care of loved one’s living with dementia.
The center also hosts exercise classes for more livelier seniors like Drums Alive and Tai Chi, which helps with arthritis, she said. There are also two groups in particular who meet for healthy living classes at HealthWorks Fitness Center.
“We meet at HealthWorks for those. One is Healthy Eating and Testing or HEAT. The HEAT program has some cooking demonstrations and they get to taste things, recipes and lunch,” Canright said. “The OWLS program, Older Wiser Livelier Seniors, is a little bit more informational. We may have a physician or geriatric specialist to give a presentation on different aspects of aging.”