The Vie Group
Thomas Sellwood CDP CADDCT is the Managing Director of The Vie Group. The Vie Group is a company that provides exercises, training and entertainments to hundreds of nursing and care homes throughout the UK and has just entered the US market.
The Vie Group has improved the health, wellbeing and happiness of thousands of people living with dementia since it was established in 2006. As well as the core programs, The Vie Group specializes in workshops and ongoing training programs in such fields as delivering and programming activities, improved service delivery for front line staff and most importantly, enhanced communication and group communication techniques for people living with dementia and associated age-related disorders. We work with care providers small and large, including Sunrise Care and Jewish Care, BUPA, Care UK and Barchester in Great Britain.
Participants, not recipients
Training our staff to deliver group activities to people with all stages of dementia was key to our success and every single group leader has been given the highest quality of training for all eventualities. Our staff does not sing at your clients, they sing WITH them. We do not talk AT your clients, we talk WITH them. We do not demonstrate, we lead and help. We include everyone who wishes to be included and do our very best to get the very most out of each and every one of your valued clientele. The Vie Group makes sure we have participants, not recipients.
Communicating with people living with dementia
As time progressed Tom increasingly noticed patterns forming in relation to what made a group happy, responsive and participatory. As he started studying the phenomena he started to realise how profound creating an inclusive atmosphere was and that was how he started to focus on his real passion.
Communicating with people living with dementia in a group setting is nebulous and hard and yet the skills Tom had learnt from training and a twenty year career as an actor gave him the unique insight into non-verbal communication. Many journals, medical studies, help books and training courses refer to this always generically. Actors are specifically trained to master the finest details of body language, facial communication, vocal tone and inflection. In addition to this Tom had been deeply involved in the creation of the field of ‘standardised patient testing’ with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD and also the US army under Graceanne Adamo. Having actively created psychological, medical and physiological cases for the training of junior doctors and even army field medics gave Tom the tools to understand the theory behind his observations.
Tom is currently taking his studies to a new level undertaking a Masters Degree in Science at Edinburgh University in ‘Working in Partnerships with Dementia and International Dementia Policy.’
He hopes to be able to spread his communication techniques to as many people as possible because without effective communication you cannot truly have ‘person centered caring’ for people living with dementia.