United Care United Group We offer About us Business system Work with us News & Press There are no strangers just friends we do not know October 1, 2015 Background People with dementia are greatly affected by the external environment. A calm and safe environment creates good conditions for good function. Despite a dementia illness, the individual has the same basic needs as all other people. The need for company and not being alone is the same whether you have dementia or not. However, the feeling of isolation and loneliness can aggravate the symptoms of dementia. An active and stimulating day should always be the basis of all treatment of people with dementia. Even if the person with dementia has good contact with relatives and staff, the feeling of loneliness can still arise. This may be linked to the impaired cognitive ability, impaired mobilization and the impaired communication ability that a dementia disease can cause. The damage to the brain caused by dementia can make it more difficult for the individual to interpret, express and understand what is happening around them. Various symptoms such as altered speech and reduced vocabulary mean that the individual may have difficulty forming sentences and making himself understood. This in turn contributes to it becoming more difficult to keep up in social contexts and isolation can then arise. In isolation, it is common for the feeling of loneliness to arise. It should be mentioned, however, that loneliness is strongly associated with a discrepancy regarding one's own perceived loneliness, how loneliness is perceived by the viewer, positive and negative loneliness and the difference between physical loneliness and the feeling of experiencing loneliness. The self-perceived feeling of loneliness in the individual can contribute to stress and depression in the person with dementia and it can manifest itself in the person becoming sad, frustrated, withdrawn and isolated. However, the feeling of loneliness is a subjective experience and can therefore mean different things to different individuals. The perceived loneliness can be interpreted as multidimensional and manifest itself in various forms such as the loneliness of the inner self which means a feeling of alienation from one's own personality, physical loneliness which means lack of contact and physical closeness to others, emotional loneliness which includes the individual's needs of emotional closeness is not satisfied, social loneliness where the individual is not involved and involved in society and spiritual loneliness where the individual's predetermined meaning of life has not been fulfilled. These factors should be kept in mind when talking about the concept of loneliness. For people with dementia, quality of life is often strongly associated with the feeling of being listened to and that someone understands what you want to convey. The fact that the dementia patient receives attention by someone confirming you and showing that you understand what the person is saying and that time is given for dialogue can also be associated with quality of life. A key factor in not experiencing loneliness both for people with a diagnosis of dementia or without is to maintain friendships and to create contact with peers. Social community and meaningfulness in everyday life are two components for good aging, regardless of illness or not. According to the National Board of Health and Welfare, the values in care and care for the elderly include the social content. The older person must be given the opportunity and motivation to interact with their surroundings. For those individuals with dementia to live a rich life with a good quality of life, it is important that as far as possible alleviate the feeling of loneliness and contribute to the person being able to create contacts with peers and integrate with their surroundings. Based on this, we have chosen to start a project called there are no strangers just friends we do not know. Purpose and goals The purpose is to counteract any loneliness and contribute to a feeling of quality of life by creating opportunities and opportunities for the tenants where they can make new contacts and feel a community with each other. Method The tenants meet through spontaneous meetings for them in, for example, the foyer that the Leva Livet inspirer or activity manager has staged. Through knowledge and awareness of the tenants and their life story, meetings are arranged between two tenants who could have a good and meaningful exchange with each other. It is not possible to predict in advance whether people will enjoy each other's company and it is therefore important to test oneself. The meeting between two tenants may also include that a tenant invites home to his apartment where coffee is offered. This on the initiative of the Leva Livet inspirer or activity manager. You can then go and buy a good cake with the tenant and help with the preparations for the invitation. This is to create a feeling that the tenant invites a friend home to him and thus gets to enter the role of host or hostess. Allowing tenants to invite them to their own apartment can strengthen self-esteem and increase well-being. The Leva Livet inspirer or activity manager can participate during the meeting, but the focus should be on the tenants and the creation of new relationships. In order to maintain the new relationships that are created, the responsibility for the project must be transferred to other staff who then ensure that the tenant's new friendship is maintained by inviting the new friend to coffee breaks or a glass of wine where the tenants can talk to each other or just hang out. It is important that each new meeting is documented to be able to see if the meeting was appreciated and if it should be done again or to see if the people did not agree but should perhaps be matched with another tenant. It is also important that the staff have a holistic view and look at the whole house and not just the respective department. The idea is that the tenants will spend time with other tenants from different departments just to meet strangers who can become new friends. Evaluation and follow-up The project has now been going on for a few months with good results. It has been shown that it takes time to find tenants who can have a meaningful and equal exchange with each other. However, we have managed to find people who live in different departments, who like to spend time with each other and thrive in each other's company. It is important to let the project take its time and to dare to try to arrange meetings several times even if the first meeting between tenants was not successful. Dementia diseases are perplexed and quite unpredictable and contribute to the individual's daily form can appear in different ways from day to day, which makes it important to be sensitive to the individual and what he or she wants and not to give up after the first meeting when different meetings can look different. The people who have so far been part of the project have thought that it has been nice to meet people they have not met before and many of them have wanted to meet again. The times we have arranged meetings, the tenants have drunk coffee or had lunch together, which has been appreciated. What the tenants have expressed that they appreciate most is to be able to come from the department for a while and just come up with something else, the nice company and to have a meaningful exchange with each other. There are many different types of dementia diseases and the symptoms of the diseases can appear in different ways from person to person. This in turn can make it more difficult to pair two people who can have a meaningful conversation together, a conversation that they themselves can hold and that flows on without major complications. The dementia disease can also contribute to the people becoming restless and feeling insecure in the situation, which can be a contributing factor to the meeting being short and having to be interrupted. Many of our tenants are at different stages in their dementia, which has also been a contributing factor to the fact that it has been difficult to find people who can have a pleasant time together. The dementia diagnoses have also meant that every meeting between the people has often become a new experience for the tenants, even if they have met each other before. The tenants may have forgotten that they have met each other before, which contributes to the fact that every time the people meet, they meet for the first time. On these occasions, it can be good if the staff is present during the conversation and uses their knowledge of the tenants to guide the conversation in this way. It should be mentioned, however, that the feeling of recognition among the tenants may remain. Since the tenants are at different stages in their illness, some also often forget what has been said before, which can create frustration when one individual remembers what is said but the other has forgotten it and therefore may repeat himself. A closer investigation of our tenants here at Victoria revealed that two of the tenants have attended the same school while growing up. We arranged for these two tenants to meet, they drank coffee, talked about their upbringing and with guidance in the conversation from the activity manager, they came to the conclusion that they had gone to the same school. This created a long conversation regarding many fun memories around the years of growing up. Since the coffee hour with the two tenants was successful, we decided to repeat this meeting during a lunch together. The conversation during lunch was not as fluent at all, however, and when the Leva Livet inspirer tried to steer the subject on growing up and schooling, the tenants could not remember which school they went to and which teachers they had. The project is still in the start-up phase and the main responsibility for the meetings lies with the activity manager and Leva Livet inspirer, which is both positive and negative. Positive in the sense that they work throughout the house and have a holistic view of which tenants can be suitable for each other, that they have time to sit down with the tenants throughout the meeting and be able to help serve coffee and guide the conversation with the tenants who have lost the ability to structure a conversation for an extended period of time. Negative as they do not have a closer relationship with each individual and may have difficulty reading the daily form of the tenant, which can make the meeting and its content more difficult. If the Leva Livet inspirer, activity manager and contact persons collaborate on the project, it can have a positive impact. In order to contribute to a life for the tenants bordered on well-being and quality of life, it is, among other things, our job as staff to try to support the individuals by encouraging them to create new social contacts and an increased sense of belonging with equals. We can do this, among other things, based on the entire staff's knowledge of all tenants. The project will therefore continue with the hope of being able to involve the staff so that the tenants can have a daily life fraught with meaningful exchange between equals, lack of loneliness, joy and quality of life. An everyday life where the feeling that a dementia disease can bring with it, that everyone is a stranger instead becomes a feeling that there are no strangers but only friends that I do not know. Josefine Lundin, Leva Livet-Inspiratör & Marianne Nörremölle Larsson, Aktivitetsansvarig på Victoria vård- och omsorgsboende, Limhamn Gå tillbaka Förenade Care AB • Höjdrodergatan 19 • 212 39 Malmö • Telefon: 040-601 81 00 • Share Print