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The Challenges of Memory: Alzheimer’s and Other Dementias

  • Course Author: Doug McNair, M.D., Ph.D.
  • Duration: 30 hours - Access for 6 months
  • Type: Self-Paced
  • Category: Palliative Spiritual Care
Price:$220

This course, The Challenge of Memory: Alzheimer’s and Other Dementias, is designed to assist chaplains, spiritual care providers, and other professional health disciplines in understanding and applying concepts about dementia to their care of persons with Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions in which cognition, memory, and expression are impaired. It includes information on how impairment of cognition and memory may affect a person’s sense of identity and their religious, spiritual, and/or existential experience. Professional providers have opportunities to mentor as well as support the patient, to safeguard the patient against medical errors and under-provisioning of palliative treatments, and to teach other caregivers who interact with and care for such patients.

 

Learning Objectives
By the end of this course the learner will be able to:

    • Describe features of dementia and its progression.

    • Identify communicative and cognitive challenges that may occur in relation to caring for persons with dementia.

    • Articulate the role of religious, spiritual, and existential factors mediating the experience of dementia.

    • Describe the role of the chaplain or spiritual care provider in engaging with persons suffering from dementia, including assessment, interventions, communication with other members of the care team, and documentation and reporting.

 

(Price includes GST and fully subsidised student registration fee)

This course was written by Doug McNair, M.D., Ph.D.

Director of Professional and Community Education HealthCare Chaplaincy Network

Doug McNair, M.D., Ph.D. is a physician and doctorally-trained engineer who is currently President of Cerner Math, a predictive analytics division of Cerner Corporation, a health informatics company based in Kansas City, Missouri. He has worked extensively with elderly patients and families in a variety of care settings, both as a hospitalist at Houston Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, and in hospice settings. In his role at Cerner, Dr. McNair has created decision-support tools for use in person-centered care, software tools that are used in more than 2,000 health institutions world-wide. He contributes to lay ministry programs of Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kansas City.

  1. Introduction
  2. The Disease Awakens: MCI and Diagnosis of Dementia
  3. Chaplains’ Assessment and Documentation
  4. Disability and the Person’s R/S History
  5. Preference for Solitariness versus Community
  6. Non-Western Perspectives
  7. Grief, Hope, and Expectation in Dementia
  8. Home and Place
  9. Worldbuilding
  10. Xenophobia and Anger
  11. Animal Nature
  12. Polypharmacy
  13. Conclusion
  14. Summary
  15. References

Aligns with the following Sub-domains in SHA’s Capability Framework for Spiritual Care Practitioners in Health (2020):

    • 1.1 Plan and prepare

    • 1.2 Client engagement

    • 1.3 Perform and deliver

    • 1.4 Monitor and review

    • 2.2 Workplace communication

    • 2.3 Integrated care

    • 3.2 Wellbeing and holistic care

*Also aligns with Capability Level 2 (Independent Practice)

Aligns with the following Priorities in the National Model for Spiritual Care in Health:

    • Priority 1: Holistic Person-Centred Care

    • Priority 2: Integrated Governance
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