OMNI homes seeing positive results from BSO initiative
Interventions helping reduce resident agitation, ease transitions
Monday, August 20, 2012 -- Deron Hamel
Staff members at OMNI Health Care long-term care homes say their involvement with the province’s Behavioural Supports Ontario (BSO) project is providing effective interventions that are reducing resident agitation and easing transitions into long-term care.

BSO is a $40-million initiative to help enhance quality of life for seniors affected by dementia and other conditions that cause agitation. The funding, which is provided to long-term care homes through Ontario’s 14 Local Health Integration Networks, is largely put towards staff education.

Sarah Wilson, a registered practical nurse/behavioural specialist at Streamway Villa in Cobourg, says the home has reduced responses associated with resident agitation by 50 per cent since using BSO interventions. Reductions in restraint use and medication administration have also resulted from interventions, she notes.

Wilson and personal support worker Shannon LeBlanc have implemented best practices, such as the intervention analysis tool, where staff members write down the supportive measures they trial prior to giving a resident medication. They then chart the results. This tool has also contributed to the successes.

Montessori techniques have also been applied to programming with success, notes Wilson.

“We’re taking a more holistic approach at managing (agitation), rather than resorting to medications,” says Wilson.

“We’ve gone to having almost no restraints in the home as well. We have one resident (who has) restraints and medication use has decreased huge.”

BSO interventions are also helping residents transition into OMNI long-term care homes. When a resident with a history of agitation recently moved into Riverview Manor in Peterborough, the home’s BSO team turned to BSO protocols to discover she likes Cheezies and dinosaurs.

RPN and BSO team member Angela Johnston says two important things she learned about the resident by spending time with her is that she loves Cheezies and was apprehensive at first about eating meat because she believed she was being served dinosaur meat — the resident, it turns out, loves dinosaurs.

Cheezies, notes Johnston, will immediately calm the resident if she experiences agitation. The team also assured the resident she would never be served dinosaur meat and as a sign of good faith they brought her a stuffed dinosaur. She’s now comfortable eating meat.

“She’s now quite happy here,” says Johnston.

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