Managing Challenging Behaviors in Dementia without Drugs

As a follow-up to last week's blog post about the increasing use of antipsychotics to manage behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) in long-term care facilities, this week's post highlight's one nursing home's efforts to counteract this trend. Pathstone Living, a nursing home in Mannkato, Minnesota, has successfully altered their approach to managing BPSD from pharmacological to behavioural and environmental interventions. "A few years ago, antipsychotics were used frequently at Pathstone. 'We saw these as medications that were supposed to help the patient and, of course, we gave them to them with the feeling that we were doing good', says Shelley Matthes, a registered nurse who is head of quality assurance for the nonprofit Ecumen, which runs Pathstone and about a dozen other nursing facilities in Minnesota. Our goal, says Matthes, was to reduce our antipsychotic use by 20 percent. And in the first year we reduced it by 97 percent".

To read more about how this facility successfully reduced the need for antipsychotic medications, visit http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/12/09/368539057/this-nursing-home-calms-troubling-behavior-without-risky-drugs.

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