Rethinking Communication guide to advanced dementia

What would need to happen to improve communication in the settings where people with advanced dementia live? Achieving that would be beneficial for everyone. It would improve the job satisfaction of care staff. Managers could feel more confident about the service they are providing. Family members could feel closer to their loved ones. Most importantly, the quality of life for people with dementia would improve. One way to provide such scaffolding is through an approach called Intensive Interaction. This means of communication has been tested in a number of experimental studies, and its results are striking. Intensive Interaction was first developed in the 1980s. It uses non-verbal communication, drawing on what we now know lies at the heart of communicative development: the kinds of imitative, turn-taking, rhythmic exchanges that occur between infants and adults. It first emerged as a method for working with people with learning disabilities and has since been used with people who have autism or sensory impairments, who