What We Do
Simile provides education, experiences and insights that help people discover how they are similar despite their differences.
What is Relationship Enhancement?
Relationship Enhancement is a connection we establish with someone that requires few spoken words. A person’s feelings and values are our priority. An enhanced relationship is a true expression of identity between or among people. It provides positive experiences that help balance the ongoing challenges faced by someone as cognitive decline progresses.
Cognitive decline is used instead of “dementia” or “Alzheimer’s” to describe changes in an older person’s ability to think and reason. This term more accurately describes the medical symptoms of the condition – memory loss, confusion, disorientation – and separates them from a person’s response to the condition – feelings, values, coping skills – their unique experience of cognitive decline.
The Relationship Enhancement Training Program
The Relationship Enhancement (RE) Training Program offers an innovative approach to care that supports a person in maintaining and shaping their identity through their experience of cognitive decline. The program emphasizes empathy, draws on insights from family and community and offers specialized communication skills. Concerning behaviours are solved collaboratively.
Training Program Objectives
- Connect through feelings
- Build trust
- Provide meaningful care
How We Can Help
If you live in Ottawa, Canada and interested in learning more about how this innovative approach to care applies to the work you do caring for a family member experiencing cognitive decline, please contact Simile. We can offer you a new perspective on care, insights, strategies and specialized communication skills to work collaboratively with someone who experiences cognitive decline.
Our Mission: To improve the quality of home support available for people who experience cognitive decline through the development and delivery of the Relationship Enhancement training program for family members, support workers and others that focuses on meaningful care.
Our Vision: To create a culture of care where caring and supportive people and inclusive places in community assist those who experience cognitive decline in expressing themselves, building and maintaining relationships and learning new ways to adapt to the challenges placed before them.
Beverly Harper, B.A., P.S.W. is a Creative Solutions Specialist. She has conducted extensive research and gained valuable insights from her front-line work as a Personal Support Worker with a variety of different people who experience cognitive decline in both home and institutional settings. Relationship Enhancement reflects her unique approach to care that incorporates credible, published research and experiences from everyday life. 
References:
The Myth of Alzheimer’s, Peter J. Whitehouse, St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY, 2008
Talking to Alzheimer’s, Claudia J. Strauss, New Harbinger Publications Inc., Oakland, CA, 2001
*From Ulysses - Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
© Simile – Training in Supportive Care, 2023
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