In an effort to broaden the skillsets of law enforcement officers, LifeCircles PACE (Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly), a home-based elderly care organization, is taking part in a crisis intervention team training program to help teach officers how to effectively handle critical situations involving older people.
Jennifer Haak, LifeCircles’ coordinator for positive approach to care, said elderly people often turn to emergency services for help in circumstances where mental health support or care from family or friends would be more appropriate. Although it can be easy to see such calls as detracting from time and resources better used elsewhere, Haak said meeting those callers’ needs and connecting them to the appropriate care actually can help reduce the amount of calls of that type.
“For older adults, loneliness and a lack of connection are really bad for wellness,” Haak said. “It’s bad for all individuals, but that age group particularly really suffers, and so you do see older adults using 911 as a tool to get connection, calling for non-emergency situations.”
Haak said the crisis intervention team (CIT) program is invested in educating participants about local programs to direct elderly people to rather than calling 911. As law enforcement officers respond to those calls, it is important that those elderly callers are treated with appropriate knowledge and care. LifeCircles does this through a combination of classroom teaching, in-person role-playing and training exercises.
Since February of last year, LifeCircles has been hosting training programs to groups of 16 law enforcement officers at a time to teach them reasoning, methods and strategies that will enable them to help elderly people who may be in a mental or behavioral health crisis, with an emphasis on those with dementia.
The program takes place every three months, placing law enforcement, EMS workers, fire department employees and even sometimes DNR officers in contact with community mental health professionals and the LifeCircles team for an intensive 40-hour week of training. The training is aimed at seasoned officers who already have been in the field for some time, adding to their skillsets.
“A lot of their initial training that they got when they first were starting out in their career was very minimal for mental health,” Haak said of the students, “and quite a bit of their interactions in the community have strong flavors of mental health. So, this is just a nice response to the needs that they’re finding, for our community to collaborate with them.”
The start of the week sees students in the classroom, learning about the elderly demographic they serve and finishing the week with role-playing exercises, many of which Haak participates in herself to help officers learn how to navigate interactions with older folks who may be confused, frightened or angry.
Although these role-playing interactions are done in full uniform, she said the emphasis is on cultivating “soft skills” and do not involve real weapons, ensuring officers are using the new tools they were given in training rather than tactical strategies.
Officers in these role-playing scenarios are placed into different situations with mental health care professionals like Haak who replicate the behaviors likely to be exhibited by an elderly person.
“My station is an older adult one and they have to figure out what my care needs are and what the next step would be to help me, using the skills that they received during the classroom time,” Haak said. “In general, I’m an older adult with a dementia diagnosis and they have to try and figure out what’s wrong. I might be lost in the community, and I’m set that I’m not lost and that they’re the ones with the problem. And so (when) there’s this argument between the two of us, how do they (the officers) solve that?”
As those with dementia often are the most easily misunderstood, Haak said this training pays special attention to interactions with dementia patients. For example, arguing the reality of a given situation may seem like a logical option for someone looking to de-escalate a person with dementia; however, that approach tends to lead to a poor outcome.
“It’s such a common trap for anybody that when you’re working with someone with dementia, if I just tell them the truth, if I tell them the facts, it should fix the situation,” Haak said. “That just escalates (the situation) because that person’s not (in) the same reality as us. So, we have to learn how to validate the emotion more than the context.”
In addition to learning how to engage with those with dementia conversationally, LifeCircles also teaches officers how to approach them, in a very literal sense.
“If you’re dealing with someone who has dementia, which is not normal aging, they really start to get tunnel vision,” Haak said. “They have a sweet spot in front of them, like six feet out. They can really see well there, but if you approach an older adult on the side, you’re really going to startle them and depending on how a person startles that could really create a possible physical interaction.
“We’re teaching the officers how to approach from the front and then slide to the side so that the person can follow them going to their side. And another technique too, is (to) be on the person’s dominant side (since) we just take in data better from our right side. So, just those little techniques to help make the person living with dementia feel better supported that we probably would never think of in a normal situation.”
These small techniques, in addition to matching the emotions of the person, learning to connect with them rather than correcting them, learning to present visually rather than verbally to not startle the person, and training on the nuances of dementia help police officers and others be better equipped to serve their community.
Haak said watching participants learn to think through scenarios with a new perspective gives her hope for the future of elderly care.
“It’s just cool to watch them think through the eyes of a mental health professional versus a tactical responder,” Haak said. “We can bring gasoline to the fire, or we can bring a hose to the fire, and we really want to be bringing a hose because we don’t want to escalate (situations) because we don’t know what to do.”
The CIT program currently is focused on strengthening the skillsets of Muskegon police officers. Haak said the program doesn’t have plans for imminent expansion, but LifeCircles will be offering a dementia training-focused fair in January to help educate and spread awareness among the West Michigan community.
This story can be found in the Oct. 3 issue of the Grand Rapids Business Journal. To get more stories like this delivered to your mailbox, subscribe here.
