Ridgeline continually seeks out, practices, and develops the most innovative programming in the industry.  Dedicated to the care and quality of life for memory care residents, Ridgeline has formed a separate arm of the company devoted to the training and development of Validation®: The Feil Method, as developed by Naomi Feil.  Ridgeline's Pacific Coast Validation (PCV) is the first and only Authorized Validation Organization on the west coast.  As an Authorized Validation Organization, Ridgeline Management has joined an international group of health care workers to be trained on the method Naomi Feil has spent over 30 years developing.

For more information on Pacific Coast Validation and Naomi Feil, please visit www.pcvalidation.com. 

PCV News

Pacific Coast Validation graduates its first group of Certified Validation Workers
31 July 2009
EUGENE, ORE

In July, Pacific Coast Validation and instructor Vicki deKlerk-Rubin awarded certificates to its first students to complete and pass the Level 1, Certified Validation Worker course.  Students in both the Oakland and Redding, CA classes attended five, 2-day blocks of class, practiced, and video-taped sessions with clients in each of four stages of dementia called ‘resolution.’  More students will receive their certifications in the coming months as they continue to practice and turn in final videos for evaluation.

The course was challenging and required students to be disciplined about their homework and working with their clients.  However, merely doing the homework was not enough.  Validation: The Feil Method is about empathy- setting aside your own feelings and judgments long enough to feel another’s emotions.  In this way, both client and worker can connect on an emotional level.  This allows the worker to better identify the basic emotional needs of the client and communicate their acknowledgement and understanding of the need.

One aspect of The Feil Method students found difficult was the idea that the worker is not there to “help” them or make things “better”, which is engrained in our care giver spirits.  Conversely, the job of the worker is to simply allow and foster the expression of feelings, emotions, and communications of those with Alzheimer’s that would otherwise be stifled, redirected, or used to fabricate lies in order to placate the resident.  Although this is a method that might take a lifetime to master, the learned techniques and uses can immediately be applied to working with appropriate Memory Care clients on a daily basis. 

So, how does The Feil Method help the client if the worker isn’t supposed to “make things better”?
 
Sue Luke, RN, of Bayberry Commons said, “I noticed that Mrs. X is more talkative and active than when we first started visiting and working with her.  I can’t help but feel we had something to do with that as we all worked with her and visited her regularly.”  Mrs. X that Sue refers to was almost entirely in a vegetative state when work with her began.  Over the course of ten weeks, however, the students who worked with her noticed an increase in her verbal abilities, physical movements, and eye contact. Although The Feil Method cannot reverse Alzheimer’s, results such as these have been observed in the years Naomi Feil developed the method.  To this extent, we are excited at the prospect of being able to work with these clients further and develop our own studies on the effectiveness of the Feil Method. 

Over half of the students in these two classes are Ridgeline community employees who work with our memory care residents.  We are very excited to start our journey along this road of having more community employees be trained in this method.  Even without taking the course, we can begin to build an empathetic attitude in our communities and teach our staff to embrace behavioral expressions as a means of better understanding the human need behind the behavior.

Many of the students will continue this fall with the Level 2: Certified Group Worker course which begins this fall.  This next level will teach students how to use The Feil Method when working with groups of memory care clients at the same time.