What is the IPPI Program?
Long-term care staff often find it challenging to engage residents living with dementia in satisfying and meaningful day-to-day activities. The Individualized Positive Psychosocial Interaction (IPPI) guides care partners to engage people living with dementia in positive ways that enhance wellbeing and address communications of distress. Research shows that nursing home residents experience more pleasure, alertness, engagement, and positive verbal behavior with IPPI activities.
IPPI training videos and tip sheets show how to effectively lead brief personal care and leisure activities specially designed for people living with dementia. The program uses data nursing home providers already collect in order to tailor activities to resident preferences. This flexible, person-centered approach can be implemented meaningfully into the existing flow of daily care.
Is the IPPI for you? Below is more information and resources that will help you understand the steps other communities took to successfully implement the IPPI, as well as how you can get in touch with us if you’re looking for a little more targeted support getting started.
What is the IPPI, and is it for you?
Step 1: Train Your Staff
The first step is to get staff trained with the education and tools they will need so they can successfully implement the IPPI.
This course is designed to increase caregivers’ awareness of their own emotions and help identify emotions in others. Caregivers learn strategies to manage their own emotions as well as the emotions of the people they care for. It is a great first step toward implementing the IPPI in your community, and a way to help individuals develop their emotional intelligence (EQ).
While the training can be taken by and useful to anyone, it will be especially useful to the staff that will be part of the IPPI implementation team.
When thinking about who will be on your community’s implementation team, it has worked well to ensure inclusion of individuals across the organization – to not immediately think of those in management positions, but to consider asking direct care staff and other people in non-management roles to participate..
Once you figure out who is on your team, you’ll want to look at what residents would benefit most from doing IPPIs.
IPPIs activities are designed for individuals living with moderate to severe dementia/cognitive impairment, and who communicate expressions of distress (i.e., those things like yelling, hitting, wandering, exit-seeking, crying, refusing care, etc. that are often also referred to as “behaviors”).
Tools and Tips for Assessing Resident Preferences
If you already have a method of assessing resident preferences that works for you, that’s great! Here are some more preference assessments and resources to consider:
To link resident preferences to specific IPPI Activities, visit our IPPI Protocols page.
If you have a resident with a preference that is very important to them but does not match any of the IPPI Activities – let us know! Chances are we can make one, and we are always looking to add more IPPIs to our growing library!
When you’re ready to start IPPIs, staff care partners who will be doing the IPPIs will want to watch these two training videos and review three tip sheets that talk about things to consider when starting, doing, and ending an IPPI activity.
Step 2: Bring the IPPI to Your Residents
Previous research has found that doing IPPIs with residents at least twice a week is associated with more pleasure, alertness, engagement, and positive verbal behavior. When IPPIs are being done, the interaction can be documented on this: Feeling Faces Emotion Assessment Tool.
Make sure to add a place for how to contact for more information or technical assistance.