Alzheimer's, Memory and Dementia Care Services

Memories made for memories lost

The Emeritus dementia care program, Join Their Journey, is designed with a clear understanding of memory loss in order to provide superior resident focused care. The premise of Join Their Journey is simple. Our staff joins residents in their moment, rather than trying to bring them into our reality. Through this approach, we recognize individuality, encourage choices, and allow them the ability to live their lives in a way that feels familiar to them.

Meeting Your Loved One’s Needs

At Emeritus dementia care communities, our caregivers focus on knowing a resident’s wants, needs and preferences based on their life story. Understanding the residents’ past experiences and preferences allow us to provide for their needs at every stage of their memory loss. We honor and validate our resident’s feelings and strive to support them to be purposeful and successful each day, despite the disease process.

Validation Techniques

We accept and join the resident’s reality or world in order to create a safe, warm and comfortable environment for the resident. This type of interaction focuses on understanding and accepting the resident’s interpretation of their surroundings and sense of self. For instance, if a resident is ready to go to work as a teacher, then we create an environment in which they would reminisce about being a teacher, or how to prepare for their upcoming class.

Life Enrichment Programming

We design each day within our memory care neighborhoods to be full of purposeful and meaningful activities that are familiar and comforting for the residents. The personal information we learn through the resident’s life story is translated into activities such as choral practice, cooking classes, gardening or walking clubs. These activities are just a few examples of how our Join Their Journey program focuses on engaging residents in order to promote their purposefulness each day.

Family Partnerships

We also join the journey of families through support, education and ongoing communication. We hold family orientations, supply a resource library, offer family support and education groups. We also issue monthly communications called “Moments in Time,” highlighting a loved one’s treasured moments at the memory care community.

Our Expertise

We understand that each person living with memory loss experiences its symptoms and progression differently. Through Join Their Journey, we understand these stages of memory loss. We create and design programming and activities to address these varying stages, enabling us to meet the right needs at the right time. For example, a resident in early-stage memory loss would enjoy an outing to a local museum. A resident in mid-stage memory loss would enjoy painting at our community, while a resident in late-stage memory loss would enjoy perusing a book of art collections with a caregiver. See our Alzheimer's, Memory and Dementia Care Resources section to learn more about the disease.

Our Family

Most importantly, we offer a patient and compassionate care staff who undergo specialized dementia care training. We offer a unique and effective training series for all of caregivers in order to support them in their unique work. Understanding how Alzheimer’s disease affects the brain helps each caregiver better understand behaviors, communication barriers and overall needs of each resident.