Savvy Caregiver is a course is for caregivers who assist family members or friends with a form of dementia. This six week training helps care partners learn about the disease as well as how to deal with situations as they arise.
The founders of Savvy Caregiver recognized that family caregivers often find themselves in an unfamiliar situation managing a person with a progressive chronic illness. Therefore, it was created to provide the skills and knowledge needed for caregivers to be more confident in this role.
What is Savvy Caregiver?
The Savvy Caregiver program is a unique approach to family caregiver education. The course covers topics like understanding the “job” of caregiving, types of dementia, dealing with feelings that arise while caregiving, fitting tasks and activities to the person’s abilities, and much more. During the six weeks, caregivers work towards learning, developing, and modifying different approaches to become more effective care partners.
For example, those completing this course will:
- increase skills and knowledge for caregiving
- understand the diseases that cause dementia and its progressive cognitive losses
- gain confidence to effectively address dementia behaviors
- learn effective ways to increase family involvement
- reduce adverse impacts of caregiving
At first, Savvy Caregiver aims to help caregivers to understand how dementia progressively affects the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral abilities of a person with Alzheimer’s. Then, it teaches strategies for dealing with those losses. It also guides care partners through developing individual care strategies and how to modify them as the disease produces changes in the person. If you are caring for a loved one with a memory disorder, this training will be extremely helpful to prepare you for the caregiving journey.
Register for Savvy Caregiver
Currently, we are offering the class virtually through Zoom. Registration is required! Please email Stephanie Sattar at Stephanie@AlzheimersProject.org to get on the wait list for the next session. All family caregivers can take this course, at no cost, thanks to grants and donations. Alzheimer’s Project is thankful for the support of our community!
