Harvest Hill creates a warm, welcoming, and safe elder community which nurtures the mind, body, and spirit of residents.
This vision doesn’t waver when it comes to staff. Nurturing the minds and spirits of the nursing staff is key to providing an extraordinary experience to the residents of Harvest Hill, an assisted and supported living retirement community in Lebanon, NH.
Continuing medical education (CME) is just one of the ways Harvest Hill supports its team of 23 full-time and 12 per diem nurses. And Catherine Martel, RN, Interim Nurse Manager at Harvest Hill, is always on the lookout for seminars for her staff.
An Alzheimer’s Association-sponsored dementia care training and certification provided the perfect opportunity to refresh the required annual dementia care training. With funds from the Florence Mooney Raser Harvest Hill Education Fund, 24 nurses were certified for their person-centric dementia care skills in 2022.
The Harvest Hill nursing staff is the front line in providing care as well as offering social interaction: a listening ear, a compassionate shoulder, and continuous support. The certification gave the nursing staff a new set of tools and techniques to provide care to residents with different levels of cognitive impairment.
“It helped our staff better understand where residents are in their cognitive decline and how best to approach them in different situations,” Martel said. “It also let us see their world from their point of view. This has offered our staff more patience, understanding, and empathy, especially when dealing with residents who are in the more advanced stages of their cognitive decline.”