Savvy Caregiver Program

Class overview

What is unique about Savvy is the angle it takes on caregiving and caregiver education.  The many clinicians and educators who have contributed to the development of the program take the perspective that caregiving is a form of clinical work, and so caregivers need a form of clinical training.  Throughout the program and laced through the various program materials, like the Caregiver’s Manual the central concept that is emphasized is the notion of strategy.  Over and over in the program, caregivers will be urged to learn, develop, and modify strategies that they will use to accomplish the goal of their caregiving a goal that the program proposes, namely the contented involvement of the person with the disease in their daily life.  In order to help caregivers develop such strategies, the program presents ideas that come from many disciplines and points them to information that comes from many sources.  Below are the areas of knowledge, skill, and outlook (attitude) that are taught or developed in the program:

• Information and Knowledge.  Many caregivers simply do not have the facts straight about what it is they are dealing with.
  -They don’t understand or believe—they are dealing with a disease that will not improve.
  -They don’t have a very clear understanding about the course of the disease or it’s usually progressive impact on the person with the disease.
  -They don’t realize, in any specific way, that Alzheimer’s and most other dementing diseases progress in stages and that the stage of the disease has great relevance for the strategies of caregiving.
  -They usually don’t have any information on the impact of caregiving on caregivers.
  
• Skills.  Caregiving is a complex job and entails many tasks.  It is a basic premise of the Savvy Caregiver program that few caregivers have received any training for the work they do as caregivers.  Since the principal task of the caregiver is to manage day-to-day life with the person, these are the skills on which the program focuses.  In particular, the program is designed to develop the following skills:
  -How to take into account the person’s disease-produced losses in the manner in which they interact with the person.
  -How to take the person’s disease stage into account in caregiving.
  -How to help the person become and remain involved in daily tasks and activities that allow the person to be contented throughout the day.
  The program also provides instruction in:
  -Important self-care skills especially those related to understanding and managing caregivers’ own feelings.
   Skills for making decisions as they continue their caregiving career.
   Skills for navigating family issues that come up while providing care.
   
• Outlook or Attitude.  The program aims to foster an increased sense of mastery in caregiving.  There are at least three areas of attitude that the program tries to affect:
  -Objectivity.  Caregivers have to learn to become less emotionally involved at least when they are trying to figure out a caregiving problem and more “clinically detached.”

We want caregivers to become more analytic and experimental in their caregiving.
-We want them to be able to step back from the person and the situation and to examine objectively and dispassionately just what they are seeing.
-Then we want them to be able to put that observation together with other knowledge they gain from the program to be able to create a plan for what they want to have happen and how they will get it to happen.

• Self Confidence.  Caregivers have to believe they can do the work they have chosen to do.  The program fosters growth in self-confidence through the home exercises and in-group coaching that constitute most of what happens in the latter part of the program.  Caregivers learn new skills through trying them.  They become more sure of their abilities through the successes they experience in trying them.
  
• Self-Valuing.  We want caregivers to appreciate their own work and worth.
  -They should be clear about why they have undertaken this role (motives), be able to state the objectives they have in mind for it (what they hope to accomplish), and be able to say what it is they want to get out of it (rewards and satisfactions).
  -They should also recognize the need for self-care that they have an obligation to themselves and the people for whom they are providing care to preserve themselves.

For more information about Savy Caregiver Training, please contact Diane Beach, MPH, Ed.D, at 858.492.4400.