Families can complete the sheets as a personal record, and as information they can pass along to a care facility. The Life Story sheets can be completed by interviewing an older person. Instead, we see a person to be admired and respected, a person who is approaching the latter part of a full and useful lifetime." The center's activities can then be planned with people's interests in mind, and information about individuals is much easier to remember and use during interactions. No longer is this person to be pitied or patronized. The frail elderly man regains his status as the president of a company or a skilled surgeon. In this way, they aren't just an "old man or woman with Alzheimer's" but become "someone's mother or grandmother, a lady who owned her own business or lived in Paris. Acknowledging a person's personal history is what allows older adults to maintain their respect, dignity and, often, their connection to the world around them and the people they love.Īt Center in the Woods, a care facility for older adults in California, PA, each staff member or volunteer who works with an older person is required to read through that person's life story. After decades of living, none of us would want our life experiences to be dismissed. Children simply don't have that kind of personal history. I've heard comments that older people, especially those with functional impairments, become "like children." Some of their behavior may be childlike, but they are NOT children. , instead of a cold list of facts, we have a biography of a fascinating human being.
They don't encourage the in-depth kind of conversation that can get at the personal and truly pertinent information…. Most of the questions are close-ended, requiring only a brief response. Most of them are a checklist format – easy to complete, but almost impossible to recall or use in any meaningful way. We believe that this is where many of the usual assessment tools fall short. Too often we only know people as they are today, failing to recognize that each person is a sum total of the experiences which make up his or her life. This fill-in-the-blanks life story has been inspired by an assessment form developed by the Center in the Woods and published in Beyond Baskets & Beads: A Manual of Activities for Older Adults with Functional Impairments by Mary Hart et al.
The sheets can be completed by a family member, staff, or young volunteers from schools. The Life Story sheets are also useful in a care setting for older adults who may have Alzheimer's, other forms of dementia, or other functional impairments.
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