Spark of Life Model of Care,
Transforming Lives in South Australia

8th February, 2024

Tania Hammond – EFNLHN Aged Care Nurse Practitioner

 

 

Anthony Ryan – EFNLHN Nursing Divisional Director Older Persons

 

 

Trudy Wadsworth – Nurse Unit Manager, Elliston Hospital

 

 

Introduction

The Eyre and Far North Local Health Network provides residential aged care services at 10 sites across a geographical region of over 330,000 square kilometres that includes regional, rural and remote locations in South Australia. Approximately 60% of the older people who choose to live in our care homes have dementia. Expert services for people with dementia frequently reside in metropolitan or larger regional centres, and for many of our community members this means travelling long distances to access specialist services and support.

Pioneering the Spark of Life Model of Care in Australia

We have had to develop innovative ways of providing dementia specific support and services that are close to people’s homes, and still reflect best practice in care. To support every older person to live their best life possible through tailoring services to meet their psychosocial and health needs, we chose Dementia Care International’s Spark of Life Model of Care. The Model safeguards and enhances the human rights of people living with dementia, promoting self-determination and facilitating emotional and psychological wellbeing through human-to-human connection in its purest form.

The education provided through the Model assists staff to look past the diagnosis of dementia and see the real person. This enables carers to assist in meeting individual’s needs, reducing stressful unwanted situations and setting individuals up daily for success. It enables us to provide true person-centred care, creating meaningful and long-lasting relationships between our clients, their families, and our staff.

The Spark of Life Model of Care was introduced to our service in 2011, and by 2019 we had 4 Master Practitioners in our Local Health Network. Master Practitioners are essential as they are drivers of the Model, demonstrating effective communication techniques, delivering cost-effective education to staff and families, and implementing the Model’s quality management system. A key component of the Spark of Life Education is providing skills to facilitate neurorehabilitation in people with dementia, thereby also reducing behaviours of concern. The healthcare services that have implemented the Model experience genuine wellbeing among the people who live there. There are many joyous moments, and both patients and staff have renewed hope.

The Spark of Life Education has transformed the quality of our service because it provides the profound skills of how to meet a person’s emotional and psychological needs, enabling improvements in their concentration, speech, memory, and physical abilities. It shows our staff how to meet the core emotional needs of people with dementia, thus removing the stigma that is often associated with dementia and enabling us to see the person for who they truly are, rather than as a symptom of a disease.

Specific Outcomes

We have evaluated and documented the outcomes of our implementation of this best practice model in our region since 2015. We have discovered that the Model has enabled us to reduce incidence of falls, reduce the use of psychotropic medications, the behavioural expressions of unmet needs, as well as improve staff and residents’ wellbeing. The Model has enabled us to provide true person-centred care, creating meaningful and long-lasting connections between our clients, their families, and our staff.

People with dementia who have previously been unable to communicate with words, have developed the ability to verbalise full, meaningful sentences through using this Model. These changes can occur in a very short space of time, and it works because the Model focuses on relationship-building between the person with dementia and the person/people supporting them. The education has changed the lives of people with debilitating changed behaviours (such as physical aggression) transforming them into happy, relaxed and engaged individuals.

Working in dementia care can be challenging, and never more so than in rural and remote areas where staff are very difficult to recruit and retain. Healthcare Services that operate with the Spark of Life Model of Care create a workplace culture that people want to be involved with as staff morale and job satisfaction is high. This culture shift promotes an environment that feels more like a home, and care staff feel like family because of the enhanced quality of psychosocial care.

Conclusion

Healthcare Services in our region that operate with the Spark of Life Model of Care as their core practice create a workplace culture that people want to be involved with as staff morale and job satisfaction is high. This culture shift promotes a supportive environment, and care staff are empowered to provide best practice care to their clients, residents, and patients. With the Model people can successfully shift from caring with their minds to also caring with their hearts (which is required in dementia care), moving from a task orientated organisation to a person orientated organisation, and being able to shift their focus to the perspective and emotional needs of the individuals they are caring for.

Our experience over 13 years is that Dementia Care International’s Spark of Life Model of Care, can assist all involved in successfully implementing the paradigm shift required to provide quality dementia care throughout entire organisations.

Recommendations:

We call upon International governments to preserve the human rights of people living with dementia by promoting the Spark of Life Model of Care and supporting its integration into aged care service delivery.
We ask that the Australian Federal and State Governments prioritise funding for implementing this best practice Model of Care.