Overture Home Care leadership team members graduate from the UNTHSC Geriatric Practice Leadership Institute’s 2019-2020 program
Overture Home Care congratulates our leadership team — CEO Denise Helms, Senior Vice President Paige Wolk and Executive Director Zach Tarrant — for completing the 2019-2020 University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC) Geriatric Practice Leadership Institute (GLPI) program.
During the GLPI program year, leadership team members work with a program coach to develop and implement quality improvement projects that focus on at least one of the Age-Friendly Health System 4Ms: What Matters, Medications, Mentation and Mobility. As the management team of a private duty home care agency that offers companion services and RN-delegated in-home care to older adults — allowing them to live independently, safely and with dignity — Denise, Paige and Zach knew that Mentation (dementia) would present the biggest challenge for the team, and the biggest potential rewards for Overture staff, patients and family caregivers.
Throughout a difficult year for senior caregivers everywhere, Denise, Paige and Zach persevered, working together to research, develop, implement and present Overture’s project to identify patients with dementia, train staff to proactively improve patient quality of life, and assist family caregivers with essential knowledge and compassionate support.
The first step to any dementia management plan is early and reliable diagnosis. So the first step for the Overture team was to identify current patients with official dementia diagnoses, and to train staff to screen other patients for referral to diagnosing physicians. Behavior assessments followed the screenings and diagnoses, with the goal of reducing negative behaviors and improving patient quality of life.
To assist with those goals, Overture team members trained and achieved certification as dementia practitioners and Dementia Live® coaches, able to assist family caregivers with dementia simulations. Additionally, two team members became certified in Compassionate Touch®, an approach combining skilled touch and specialized communication to prevent behavioral expression in people with dementia. Those team members took the Overture project to the greater Fort Worth community by in turn provided training to an AARP group of seniors and family caregivers. Overture team members also put together National Institutes of Health (NIH) resource packages and distributed them to family members of clients with dementia diagnoses.
We are proud of the Overture GLPI team, and proud to say that the increased focus on diagnosis identification, training, and knowledge of behaviors associated with dementia have allowed our office personnel and front line staff to successfully manage those behaviors and assist with education of families and patients. This has led to better patient and family satisfaction as evidenced by our surveys.
We would like to thank the UNTHSC GLPI program for this opportunity, as well as our team coach, Joanne T. Mize, the Executive Director of UNTHSC Clinical Practice Group, for her guidance — and again congratulate Denise, Paige and Zach.
Links: