Last week, social workers and people from around central New York came to Syracuse University to learn how to provide care for those with dementia.

Katrina VanFleet and Kristin Campbell, who both work for the Alzheimer’s Association’s central New York chapter, organized the event. The program was a non-credit workshop which ran for more than five hours on Sept. 11 at the Nancy Cantor Warehouse.

VanFleet said that the program was focused on assisting all types of dementia. They wanted to make sure the program is individualized because Alzheimer’s is different for each person.

“I think it is important that all people that deal with dementia have direct and excellent care for Alzheimer’s, and we want to ensure people are receiving the highest level of care,” said VanFleet.

The program was hosted by the School of Social Work at SU’s David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, and provided an overview of the disease, according to Falk’s website. Kristin Esposito, the internship placement coordinator at Falk College, said the program is approved by the Licensed Master Social Workers and Licensed Clinical Social Workers continuing education program.

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Participants would be able to learn “basic information about dementia and Alzheimer’s disease” and practice for needs-assessments and care planning, among other things, according to the website.

The role of human service providers is they know how to help and direct families from an individual standpoint, VanFleet said.

“There’s a lot of people in this community that have someone that they know who has dementia and we want to try our best to help them,” she said.

Esposito said the workshop is for those who want to continue their long-term care education for people who have the disease. The focus of the program is to bring the best care to their loved ones that they can possibly get, she added.

While the program was open to everyone, it was specifically targeted to social workers who want an in-depth knowledge of Alzheimer’s disease, said Campbell. She added that the event’s attendees were mostly social workers.

Campbell said that the program was “well-received” by her colleagues and that they were excited to have a lot of social workers at the event.

“We were so pleased to have social workers attend from diverse long-term care and community-based settings across New York State,” Campbell said. “The engaging activities in this training helped everyone to interact with the material and apply it to each of their agency-specific roles.”

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Published on September 15, 2019 at 11:04 pm

Contact Christopher: [email protected] | @chrisscargs