When the Training Doesn’t Work
People often ask two questions about how caregivers are trained at our organization, how much and how well? The first is easy: twenty hours initially, with two additional hours of direct support and training each month, more for individual-specific needs.
The second question, how well, is something we’re still learning to answer honestly.
After our most recent dementia training session, Nina pulled me aside.
“Kimberly,” she said quietly, “even Tammie was on her phone.”
I knew exactly what she meant. Tammie is one of the most attentive caregivers on our team. She asks thoughtful questions, notices subtle changes, and holds her relationships with clients with real care. If she had disconnected, the problem wasn’t motivation. Something about the way we were teaching wasn’t connecting.
The stakes are real. While only some of the people we serve carry formal dementia diagnoses, many are experiencing significant cognitive and functional decline. The caregivers we work alongside are trying every day to remain in authentic relationship with people who are changing. They wanted this support.
That same week we hosted community workshops for family members and people living with dementia, sponsored by the Robert Stranahan Fund. People interjected, shared their own stories, and asked questions long after the sessions ended.
But our in-house professional caregiver sessions felt different. Not resistant. Not hostile. Just somewhere else.
Afterward, Nina Martinez, Roberta Payne, Andrea Pacheco, Maxine Swisa, and I sat together trying to understand what had happened. What we kept coming back to was the format. The trainings and workshops were entirely language-based: long explanations, medical terminology, extended lectures. Most of us don’t actually learn that way. We learn through doing, watching, practicing, feeling something land in the body before it settles in the mind. Lecture is the easiest format to default to, relying on the expertise already in the room. The caregivers we work alongside arrived with immediate practical needs, then were asked to absorb hours of abstract information.
That isn’t a failure of the caregivers. It’s a failure of imagination about how learning actually works.
In dementia, language is often one of the first bridges to weaken. A person may lose words while still retaining emotion, rhythm, humor, music, facial recognition, and the ability to feel comforted by another person’s calm presence. Relationship doesn’t require language to remain real.
But we were trying to teach dementia care almost entirely through the cognitive pathways dementia erodes.
So we’re building something different: an experiential dementia learning lab. At its center is a two-person simulation. One person moves through the experience of cognitive and sensory impairment from the inside. The other practices being the caregiver, responding with the tools, presence, and skill that real support requires. The experience ends gently: familiar music, a warm drink, kind regard. Then they switch, and the caregiver becomes the cared for.
We’re also ordering 3D brain models, and compiling a resource library of games, environmental supports, and caregiver tools.
What passes between those two people is the learning. When you’ve felt that disorientation yourself and experienced kind presence and support from another in that moment, something shifts. That isn’t technique. It’s the empathy that makes grace possible.
Good caregiving is meeting people where they are, not where we wish they were.
We can’t teach that from a distance. We have to embody it in the way we show up for the people we serve, and in how we build the conditions for everyone on the team to grow. Presence isn’t something you absorb from a lecture. It’s something you practice until it becomes the way you move through the work.
This column ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on June 2, 2026, under Business Different.
