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Building a Memory Care Culture – Philosophy and Practice

When you have a loved one who needs memory care, you need to look beyond the physical building – although that is important – and focus on how the facility provides services to its residents. At Heartwood, everything we do is driven from one goal: to offer the very best in memory care and that begins with our memory care culture.

That goal sounds ambitious, but it really drives what we do each and every day. We have carefully developed a set of guiding principles that ensures we are delivering the best possible care to our residents. These principles are not just a marketing slogan or developed for a brochure, but something all our employees focus on daily.

Memory Care Culture Rooted in Our Principles

From our principles, we have developed philosophies and practices to help us build a memory care culture focused on each and every resident. Here is how we put our principles into practice:

  • Promote dignity and respect by providing a “real” home environment where daily living activities happen in a low stress setting.
  • Provide a structured setting by offering patient-focused care in an environment that allows a full range of unrestricted movement within a safe area.
  • Engage in activities to improve quality of life by offering daily meaningful and purposeful programming that is specific to residents’ needs, desires, preferences and stage of disease.
  • Acknowledge and redirect our residents. Our well-trained, competent staff acknowledges our residents’ realities, redirect them and modify their environment and our expectations.
  • Value each individual by allowing residents to build personal relationships and experience life in a positive environment that honors and respects them and their families.
  • Love and respect by providing residents with ample loving, understanding, respectful physical touch and a sense of belonging regardless of their individual limitations.

Our principles are incorporated in what we do every day. For example, our homes are not only attractive and comfortable, but designed with memory care in mind. We are also focused on providing the right services for each individual – what we do is not a cookie-cutter approach. Our activities are designed to provide comfort, support and good health to our residents while trying to improve the lives of their family members. All of this contributes to the creation of a culture that helps us reach our goal of offering the very best in memory care.

Memory Care Culture Nurtured by Our Shared Values

As a values-based memory care center, we are committed to a set of shared values that guide our daily actions. These values include:

  • Preserving dignity
  • Nurturing the spirit
  • Celebrating individuality
  • Enabling freedom of choice
  • Encouraging independence
  • Involving family and friends
  • Teamwork
  • Honesty
  • Innovation
  • …and a culture of aging that reflects our person-centered values

When you pull everything that we do together, you can see how different we are from other facilities. The personalized, devoted care we provide comes from the culture we have developed that puts our residents first.