The Alzheimer's Disease Bookstore

Alzheimer's Disease: Activity-Focused Care 

2nd Edition

Published by Butterworth-Heinemann Medical

Publisher's Description:

Alzheimer's Disease: Activity-Focused Care is a manual that provides practical and innovative strategies, interventions, and guidelines for professional care-givers working with persons with dementia. This book emphasizes simplifications of daily living tasks, and promotes exercise and mobility as activities to generate a sense of well being.

The updated edition of this unique guide provides practical and innovative strategies for care of people with Alzheimer's disease, emphasizing the activities that make up daily living - dressing, tolieting, eating, exercising, communication. The text is written from the viewpoint that activity-focused care promotes the resident's cognitive, physical, psychosocial, and spiritual wellbeing. Hellen's focus is on activities that emphasize the abilities of the residents. Caregivers are urged to do support the patient by participating in daily life tasks and activities "with" the patients rather than doing "to" or "for" them.

Learn how

• activity-focused care emphasizes abilities, not inabilities
• to use a holistic approach to improve the quality of life
• to do with the person with dementia, not to
• responses are symbols of a search for activity
• caregivers must modify approaches - persons with dementia cannot
• professionals and families are partners in care-giving

Carly R. Hellen, OTR/L, is Nursing Home Services Director, Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center, Chicago, Illinois. She has written numerous articles on caring for persons with dementia.