To Manage Dementia, Start With The Caregivers

"We realized we needed to do something different," Kales says. "We just can't train enough physicians to provide dementia care. Instead, we need to take the daily treatment and management of these patients out of the hands of physicians and put it into the hands of the caregivers themselves."

Kales, a geriatric psychiatrist who practices at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, has developed a behavioral approach to dementia care, one that puts the caregiver first and emphasizes training and support for them as much as for the patient. By teaching caregivers new ways to solve old problems, and to respond to their own needs in as well as those of their loved ones, the approach helps ease their burden while simultaneously improving the patient's experience. It's a bit like airplane safety rules directing passengers to put on their own oxygen masks before helping someone else.

"The trick seems to be in training family caregivers to spot triggers of behavior and problem-solve around those triggers, to look for underlying causes and then creatively develop strategies," Kales says. But such approaches are rarely employed because there's no systematic way to teach people how to use them.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/15/647992785/to-manage-dementia-well-start-with-the-caregivers