In senior living, innovation is everywhere. Fresh, cutting-edge advances emerge every day – sometimes later quietly fading from view after never finding their footing in the field.
Memory care in senior living, for instance, is seeing “a tsunami of new, innovative approaches,” according to Melissa Evraets, vice president of resident care and chief nursing officer for Vi Senior Living. That makes it more important than ever for memory care providers to bring focus and clarity to their philosophy of care, ensuring that they have a grounded, strategic perspective for the decisions they make and the service that they provide to residents.
For Canvas by Vi, the memory care program of Vi Senior Living, that perspective comes in the form of four person-centered care pillars. Through the integration of research-focused approaches and curated areas of service delivery, the pillars create a framework that helps Vi decide how to be innovative.
“If you don’t have grounding principles, and you don’t have a structure and you don’t have a genuine approach, then you will just grab on to the latest shiny thing in front of you,” Evraets said.
Evraets shared with Senior Living Executive the pillars and how Canvas by Vi lives by them.
Pillar: Personalized Care
In Vi’s words: Canvas gets to know every Vi resident as a person — their interests, hobbies, preferences, history, and day-to-day life — to offer the specialized services and care needed to live as fully as possible. Canvas provides attentive caregivers 24 hours a day, seven days a week to support each resident’s personal needs and activities of daily living.
Evraets said a personalized approach means diving into everything about a resident and using that to create a curated experience that evolves as caregivers continue to get to know them and their preferences.
A prioritization of research permeates each pillar, Evraets said. That includes researching a resident’s interests, preferences and behaviors, and research can inform not only best practices but optimizing the design of spaces for residents.
“We really want to enhance the experience where we know everything we can know about the resident so that we can individualize and curate their experience within our environment,” Evraets said. “Everybody’s journey is not the same. If your loved one was entering memory support, you wouldn’t want them to get the exact same treatment that the person next to them is receiving. So research helps us design things and individualize things and also create a curated journey.”
For memory care residents who started in a Vi independent living space, the handoff between caregivers provides a wealth of information. For those moving in from an external residence, loved ones prove to be critical sources of insight.
As much as possible, of course, Vi wants to learn from the residents themselves.
“If they can talk to us, and they’re in a situation where they can tell us and have a good conversation with us about their history, their hobbies, their likes, dislikes, you want to take that directly from the resident,” Evraets said. “Even if that resident can’t fully communicate, we want to get as much as we can.”
When care can be individualized and staff members demonstrate a genuine interest in residents and their interests, those residents feel a sense of pride, Evraets said. “They know when you’re interacting with them with purpose and genuinely engaging with them and their interests,” she said.
“A personalized care approach is everything from what time do you like to take a bath or shower, when do you like to eat – not everyone wants to eat at institutionalized mealtimes,” Evraets said. “Not everyone has the same level of energy throughout the day. Not everyone is on the same type of medication. Of course, we also look for changes in behaviors or look for signs and symptoms that a medication is working or not working. We really take a full view of every resident and meet them where they are.”
Pillar: Whole-Person Wellness
In Vi’s words: Vi understands that physical health is just one aspect of resident wellness. Canvas incorporates Vi’s Living Well philosophy to enrich resident minds and spirit with learning experiences, brain fitness, stress reduction, and social engagement. True to Vi’s focus on whole-person wellness, with Canvas, residents are empowered with an opportunity to participate actively in a functional lifestyle that considers their evolving memory care and support needs.
In all its divisions, Vi follows a Living Well philosophy that represents a holistic approach to wellness that encompasses mind, body and spirit. Evraets said Vi strives to make sure that everything about their residents is cared for – not just their physical condition and their cognitive challenges.
“Are they stimulated intellectually?” Evraets said. “Are they stimulated spiritually to the extent they would like to be? Do they get the physical activity that they want? That’s what this whole-person wellness approach is about.”
The pillars overlap and align with each other, such as how personalized care and whole-person wellness work hand-in-hand.
“When you walk through memory support, our quieter residents are going to be engaged in quiet activities and we provide a space for that, and then our residents that want more social activities, music, interaction, exercise, you’re going to see them in another area of the community working to keep that engagement going,” Evraets said. “So it’s not a traditional approach where everybody’s just gathered in one room and if you participate, you participate and if you don’t, you can stay in your room or you can sit to the side. We really try to work with the residents’ whole-person wellness based on what we’ve learned from the personalized care pillar about them.”
Whole-person wellness means bringing in staff and resources from other divisions to support memory care residents. For instance, the food and beverage department plays a vital role in helping to ensure that memory care residents have compelling dining experiences that are unique and enjoyable.
Details about a resident’s past can be critical to their whole-person wellness in the present. For residents whose work experience was a part of their identity, for instance, integrating that component of their background into their care can be both enriching and empowering, Evraets said.
“We know that the more you know about them, and you can say little things that show you’re caring about them genuinely as a person that you will see those residents light up – their demeanor changes,” Evraets said. “We have less instances of the need for psychotropic medications, less depressive episodes, less unwanted behaviors or challenging behaviors. We have less and less of those as we provide more and more of this type of approach and philosophy.”
Pillar: An Expert Team
In Vi’s words: Vi’s commitment to delivering on the highest standards of care and service begins with a team of compassionate experts. In close collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Association, caregivers and staff within Canvas complete training, certification, and ongoing development to ensure that they’re continuing to evolve with the cutting edge of memory care and support services.
Vi’s philosophy means incorporating research into its memory care practice to make sure its expert team is providing the best possible care for its residents. Evraets said research could mean Vi itself doing internal research into its own tools and processes and how they related to residents’ outcomes, and it could mean partnering with a vendor to evaluate how successful new technologies have been when put into practice, such as in the recent case of a virtual reality solution that had been piloted at a Vi community. Without research, Evraets notes, you can’t find out if what you are doing is actually benefiting residents.
“It’s important for us to be looking at not only our own outcomes, but what is happening within the industry,” Evraets said. “And it’s important because if we want to stay relevant to your residents, we have to continue to research what’s going on out there with medications, with treatments, with technology, with environments.”
Evraets said Vi’s devotion to its team members staying engaged with trends and developments in the field includes close partnerships with outside organizations, such as ensuring more than 320 Vi employees have completed certification training through the Alzheimer’s Association. Vi team members also are active on Alzheimer’s Association roundtables, boards and committees,
Staff members are trained for the unique needs of memory care residents, including how to connect with them.
“Our staff do these interviews and are trained to pull out even from a cognitively challenged resident the little bitty pieces here and there that the resident is still aware of,” Evraets said. “It is important to walk them through spaces and ask them questions to see what resonates with them. We watch their body language. What lights them up as we tour the facility? What are they drawn to? Are they drawn to dining? Are they drawn to activities? Are they in a place where they’re struggling to combat isolation?”
An expert team means the entire team, Evraets noted. For instance, housekeepers in memory care are trained for situations in which a resident’s cognitive condition creates challenges, such as them believing the housekeeper is an intruder.
“We want housekeeping to be just as knowledgeable and provide that whole-person approach just like activities or lifestyles or nursing is doing,” Evraets said. “Those details matter.”
Pillar: A Progressive Approach
In Vi’s words: Canvas stays on the evolution of memory care and support services by incorporating some of the latest technology to better serve a new generation of residents. Canvas leverages advanced therapies, such as virtual reality and the LifeLoop system, to provide residents and families with interactive offerings that facilitate social connections and meaningful engagement through content-driven digital experiences.
New tech tools have become synonymous with innovation in all industries, and Evraets said Vi’s approach to the use of technology is to focus on person-centered outcomes, avoiding getting lured into adopting tech tools that simply grab attention.
“We don’t want to use technology that is just fun to use,” Evraets said. “We really wanted to connect it to research. We ask what are the residents getting out of this? How is this improving them? Is it helping them to get out of their spaces and get more socialized? If that’s not happening with technology, then we don’t want to use it. The technology has to offer a good outcome.”
Vi only adopts tech solutions that touch on the company’s other pillars. Evraets said that the use of the pillars helps teams make decisions with a common focus on the “whole person experience” in mind.
“By being engaged with the newest research, we hear a lot of what’s coming our way, and then we can analyze that,” Evraets said. “If it’s a new technology, we can ask for a demonstration and ask them what their quality controls are – because not every technology is going to be appropriate for us or for the industry. It’s important for us to stay on top of that so that we can stay cutting edge and we can stay genuine in the approach.”
Vi’s emphasis on staying on the cutting edge can be misleading and suggest simply chasing trends, Evraets said. For Vi, cutting edge means going above and beyond regulatory requirements to help raise the bar for memory care and to “always stay connected to what’s new,” Evraets said.
“For us, cutting edge means making sure you are working toward the best possible outcome for the residents and researching and measuring it,” Evraets said.
A collaborative creation
The power of the pillars rests in part from their development incorporating insights from a wide variety of stakeholders, Evraets said.
“This has really been a collaborative approach,” Evraets said. “This was not a corporate-driven initiative or one person’s idea. It bubbled up through the communities and the direct care staff that are providing this care at the bedside and a collaboration with everybody – legal, lifestyles, food and beverage – this was really a full organization development opportunity for us, and I think they’ve done a great job of putting down a foundation. It was important for us that everybody joins in, and people have been very excited about this approach.”
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