Workshops for Families and Professionals
Workshops involve a combination of educational content, rich story-telling, case scenarios, lecture, and active audience engagement. Kay’s extensive background in geriatrics, hospice, palliative care and mental health allows her to address the diverse and complex experiences of her clients and audiences in a very relatable way.
Known for bringing passion, integrity, humor, and a unique authenticity to her work, Kay can make often uncomfortable topics safe to explore for family and professional caregivers alike.
All workshops are facilitated by Kay Adams, licensed clinical social worker.
Dementia Workshops Offered by Kay M Adams
Can You Relate: How Empathy and Compassion Can Help Mitigate
Crisis, Avoid Burnout, and Bring Fulfillment to Our Work
This workshop will help professional care partners understand how dementia affects our brain, abilities, and influences our behavior. It will apply the 4 steps of empathy to the work that we do, and identify some of the challenges our clients living with dementia and their families face, and how to best support them. We will address how dementia puts those living with the disease at risk due to wandering, depression, agitation, behavioral expressions, hallucinations and delusions, and how those types of issues can lead to crisis situations. Lastly, we will explore the concept of caregiver burnout and ways to avoid it, so that we can enjoy more fulfillment in the challenging and important work that we do.
3-hour class. Can be adapted for shorter workshops, upon request.
Cultivating Competence and Compassion in Dementia Care:
It’s More than What you Know, It’s How you Show It
As dementia continues to rise in epidemic numbers, so too, does the challenge of providing competent care to those most impacted. It is therefore vital to understand the implications this disease has on grief, loss, and relationships, and how to compassionately support people living with dementia and their care partners. Being aware of the role that palliative care can play in supporting people living with dementia and their families is another important aspect that this workshop will address.
1-hour class
Making Sense of the Mess: Understanding the Grief of Dementia,
and the Power of Perspective and Self-Care
This workshop addresses how caring for a person who is living with any kind of dementia inherently involves entering a world of uncertainty and grief. Doing so can feel chaotic, messy, and overwhelming for care partners. It’s hard to understand what is going on, what to do next, and how to effectively help someone with a brain disease that is ever-changing.
This workshop helps “make sense of the mess” that can come with caring for someone impacted by dementia by exploring the underlying grief and loss involved, by empowering people to change their perspectives, and by understanding why self-care is not a selfish act, but an act of self-preservation.
90 Minute Workshop
Dementia in Healthcare: What to Know, What to Do, and How to Help
This workshop provides an in-depth view of the most common brain changes that are caused by dementia and how they directly impact the person living with this challenging disease in terms of changes in memory, vision, communication, functional abilities, independence, and self-care. It also highlights the role of professionals in recognizing symptoms of dementia in the clients they care for and how to support family care partners in the home.
1 Hour Workshop
Dementia: What Most People Don’t Know, but Should
This workshop provides a brief overview of what dementia is and the most common kinds of dementias that impact the majority of people who have a dementia diagnosis. It discusses the role of anticipatory grief and ambiguous loss in dementia care, the profound impact that this disease can have on relationships, and how to support caregivers in your community.
and organizations.
30-45 Minute Workshop
Mending Fences: A Person-Centered Approach to Facilitating Hope and Healing
This workshop will enable participants to recognize the role of family systems theory as it pertains to counseling individuals and families who are facing life-limiting illnesses, and learn how to apply a person-centered approach to people living with dementia in order to facilitate hope and healing in relationships. The workshop will also identify ways to support individuals impacted by dementia so that they can “make meaning” in their lives while they are still able to participate in the process in a relevant way.
1 Hour Workshop
Ripple Effects: Navigating the Challenges of Dementia While Staying Afloat as a Care Partner
This workshop is designed for anyone who is interested in learning more about the difference between normal aging and dementia. It will identify the most common forms of dementia, and shed light on how dementia can affect our brains, abilities, and influence our behavior. The program focuses on common emotional struggles that many care partners face, and how to cope with difficult feelings in a healthy fashion. It will additionally explore strategies to manage caregiver stress, as well as the art of accepting assistance from others so that you are not only able to take better care of your loved ones, but also of yourself.
90 Minute Workshop
The Stories We Tell: Creative Ways to Apply Narrative Therapy,
Story Telling, and Improv into Social Work Practice
Understand how to apply the therapeutic skill of story-telling with patients and families while identifying ways in which utilizing narrative therapy can be a therapeutic benefit for hospice and palliative care social workers or other helping professionals. Learn to apply the five core techniques of improvisational comedy to working with people living with dementia, and have FUN while you’re learning!
or other helping professionals.
1 Hour Workshop
Timing is Everything: The Importance of Advance Care Planning, Decisional Capacity,
and Supporting People Living with Dementia and Their Families
This workshop addresses the critical importance of timing in Advance Care Planning when working with people living with dementia and their families. Advance care planning (ACP) is an ongoing process in which patients, their families, and their health care providers reflect on the patient’s goals, values, and beliefs, and discuss how they should inform current and future medical care.
Advance care planning is the vitally important process by which patients make decisions that can guide their future health care, if they become unable to speak for themselves. This program also reviews and describes the most common forms of dementias, builds skills for recognizing decision making capacity, and discusses the red flags involved in that process.
but could be adapted for family caregivers as well.
1 Hour Workshop
Wading in Emotional Quicksand: The Powerful Role of Anticipatory Grief
and Ambiguous Loss in Dementia Care
This workshop delves into the world of anticipatory grief & ambiguous loss– what it looks like, what it is, and how it applies to providing care to people living with dementia. The workshop helps identify coping strategies to effectively deal with caregiving challenges, stages of grief, and common behavioral expressions and unmet needs of people living with dementia. It also explores ways to get out of emotional quicksand once you start sinking, with guidelines to help care partners not just survive, but thrive on their caregiving journeys.
1 or 3 Hour Workshops Offered
While There’s Still Time: Facilitating Emotional Healing
and Closure Among People Living with Dementia
This workshop is built around a case study which explores the importance of timely psychosocial interventions among people living with dementia and other life-limiting illnesses. The content allows for deep discussion about complex family dynamics that can take place, and how to facilitate meaning-making and emotional healing for cognitively impaired individuals while they can still actively participate in the process.
1 Hour Workshop
Why We Do the Things We Do: Finding Joy and Satisfaction
Amongst the Challenges of Dementia Care
This highly interactive workshop examines the relationship between dementia care and improvisational comedy. It explores improv techniques that can be applied in fun and effective ways when working with or caring for people living with dementia, and increase the overall satisfaction of family and professional care partners in the process.
90 Minute Workshop
