Program Educates the Public in Caregiving for Patients with Alzheimer Disease

The Brain Center, a comprehensive neurology care provider in Miami, Florida, is partnering with the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences (USAHS) on an educational program to provide nonprofessional caregivers with strategies to better care for their family members with Alzheimer disease (AD). The program is designed to provide critical knowledge to nonprofessional caregivers and to assist in reducing their stress.

The Brain Center’s Alzheimer’s Caregivers Course, taught by licensed health care professionals, will provide participants with instruction on AD pathology and prevention as well as guidance on assisting in their patients’ daily living and the management AD-associated behaviors that can be particularly challenging. Caregivers also will receive training in strategies to reduce their own stress. Additionally, through the Dementia Live platform, participants will experience a simulation of life for a patient with AD. Students at USAHS also also benefit from this program, having the opportunity to take part in the course and to assist in the instruction, providing practical experience with types of families and nonprofessional caregivers they will work with in their careers.

"This program will do so many good things at once,” said Carolina Hoires, Director of Social Services at the Brain Center. “It will give members of the public a theoretical foundation, tools to improve the care they provide, tools to manage the distress they feel, and, maybe most importantly, the solace of a community of people navigating the same path they are."

Unpaid individuals, such as family members, account for approximately 80% of caregivers of patients with AD. These nonprofessional caregivers may lack critical knowledge about AD, and therefore face challenges that result in significant stress. The Brain Center’s Alzheimer’s Caregivers Course was developed to address this knowledge gap and thereby reduce stress in nonprofessional caregivers of patients with AD. The course will be offered multiple times a year.