Exploring the future of dementia patient care with Meth-Wick.
The Meth-Wick Community is a senior living community in Cedar Rapids, IA. A dedicated provider of care for elderly residents, Meth-Wick faced a significant challenge in ensuring that their staff was well-prepared to meet the unique needs of their diverse patient population.
With a commitment to providing compassionate and high-quality care, they recognized the importance of comprehensive staff training. However, their existing training methods were falling short in several key areas:
Problem 1: Diverse and Complex Patient Needs
Meth-Wick's residents exhibit a wide range of healthcare requirements, with some individuals coping with moderate to severe dementia-related conditions. Providing tailored care to each resident demands a nuanced understanding of their individual needs, which past nursing experiences outside of assisted living healthcare and existing training failed to adequately address. This results in hundreds of hours monthly conversations with administrators and trainers.
Problem 2: Outdated Training Resources
Training resources, including PDFs, web and video, quickly become outdated, making it challenging to engage and educate staff effectively. With the ever-evolving field of post-Pandemic healthcare, keeping training up-to-date with the latest best practices and regulations is becoming increasingly difficult.
Problem 3: Time and Resource Constraints
The facility faces limitations in terms of time and resources. Their existing training approach requires significant time commitments from both trainers and trainees, as well as numerous 1-on-1 conversations with leadership regarding healthcare standards and community expectations. With this being repeated annually for compliance, training was affecting overall operational efficiency and staff morale.
How might we?
We asked— how might we revolutionize nursing staff training at the Meth-Wick Community to meet the diverse and complex needs of their residents, while ensuring scalability, up-to-date resources, and efficient use of time and resources?
Design Priorities
In early conversations with stakeholders we identified six key design priorities that would help shape a successful simulation training experience:
Bring complex, human situations to life
Put the trainee in the driver’s seat
Create a safe environment for practice
Provide informed feedback and encouragement
Be flexible and adapt to early user feedback
Consider how this content might scale moving forward
Above: Example FigJam, with character dialog and choices flowed out. This helps inform the narrative and flow of a story, and accelerate creation time.
The Design
Working with stakeholders, we ultimately decided to focus on dementia patient care, especially for Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA) who are always in high demand. This area in particular was often overlooked in the nursing staff’s previous industry experiences, like in school or in general healthcare environments like hospitals.
Working with CNA leads and nursing staff, we identified four key behaviors that embodied patient-centered care when it came to assisting residents with dementia, in order to model our initial training experience.
Key Behaviors:
Establish rapport
Offer positive reinforcement
Engage in conversation
Provide clear instructions
By mastering and employing these key behaviors in everyday situations, healthcare staff would be better equipped to support and positively engage with residents with dementia.
Early on, we used FigJam, a collaborative whiteboard tool, to capture ideas and map out our experience. Then, harnessing the power of Storyteller Studio, our simulation training content authoring platform, we created an interactive ‘choose your own adventure’ style training experience, in which trainees help Jessica, a new CNA at Meth-Wick, as she assists various residents.
The initial experience focused on Mary, a resident with dementia who has lost her way.
We designed the overall flow of the experience to compliment the four key behaviors, allowing trainees to select questions and responses for Jessica to say. Ultimately, Mary would either leave confident, or deflated and a bit anxious.
Using our page-based timeline editor, we created simple branching paths for each question trainees encounter, offering them encouragement or feedback as they select answers based on key behaviors. Mary too is able to express thanks or frustration, using an AI voice and easily selectable character animations.
The experience was created for Mac, PC, iPad and iPhone.
Initial Response
While CNA leads enjoyed the choose your own adventure gameplay, and the feeling of participating in the scene alongside Jessica and Mary, they pushed us to go further and create an experience that better represented the way situations could get out of hand quickly.
Based on this feedback, we went back to the drawing board and created a new character, named Mark. Mark is introduced to Jessica via Sarah, a staff member who had found Mark in the parking lot waiting for his kids to pick him up; he’d been there for over an hour. Mark is resistant to help and quickly dismissive of unpreferred responses, ensuring that trainees think critically about how they engage and how they employ Meth-Wick’s key behaviors.
Above: A look at the final experience created using Storyteller Studio. With a clear outline and script in hand, this took a single non-developer roughly 30 minutes to create.
“There is so much value in Storyteller Studio! It’s easy to overlook the amount of time it takes to train a new employee well, and continue that through ongoing education to a large team. My Lead CNAs were able to quickly shape this training story, giving them ownership and highlighting their unique expertise. We can now use this training on all staff and make sure our message is clear and our excellent culture of care is maintained.”
— Dr. Holly Lear, Nursing Home Administrator | Director of Post-Acute Care
“Working with patients with dementia, things can get out of hand quickly, even violent. I love being able to practice “hands-on” in a safe environment.”
— CNA Lead, Meth-Wick Community
Outcomes
Upon a final evaluation of the experience, we received overwhelmingly positive feedback from CNA leads and nursing administration, who both celebrated the fun and immersive gameplay, and were eager to propose several new follow-up training stories they wanted to see in the future.
By focusing on our design principles, and using Storyteller Studio to quickly bring this experience to life, we created a solution that addressed the specific needs of the Meth-Wick healthcare team, and delivered a high-quality, adaptable, and efficient learning experience for their broader staff.
The Meth-Wick team agreed that such training at scale would have confidence from training leads and administrators. Nursing and CNA staff can receive as good- if not better than in-person training, and in a way that activates and engages staff in a way traditional training methods can’t compare to.