Carmen Bowman Keynote/Workshop/Session Descriptions

If you’ve never heard Carmen speak, there is a YouTube clip of her speaking to the Ohio Person-Centered Care Coalition about highest practicable level of well-being required at Tag 279Comprehensive Care Plan: and on the Surplus Safety panel at the Eden Alternative International conference with Dr. Bill Thomas at:

CMS Reform of LTC Requirements: Final Rule

CMS issue the Reform of Requirements for LTC Facilities: Final Rule in Sept. 28, 2016. Phase I implementation was already required by Nov. 28, 2016. Have you read the 712-page document? The majority explains CMS response to public comments, rationale for decisions, implementation timeframes, predicted costs in addition to the 104 pages of new regulations. Start hearing about and learning the new requirements (last regulation changes were in 1991) – what’s new and what remains, as well as some culture change wins.Together we’ll brainstorm ways to comply that don’t cost a lot of money; many culture change practices cost nothing. (Best as an all day workshop/90 min. at the least.)

Alarms: The New Deficient Practice?

Replacing Alarms and Preventing Falls by Engaging with Life

Join the discussion to ponder the use of alarms. Learn how the use of alarms deficient practice at seven CMS requirements. Although no research shows that alarms prevent falls and there is evidence that alarms cause harm both physically and psychologically, they are still used widely. Replacing alarms with better practices has actually reduced falls in the homes that have committed to no longer use them. Learn the reasons why, and the ways how, to replace alarmswith the better practices alarm free homes use around the country. (Half or all day workshop.)

The New CMS Dementia Care Focused Survey – Create a Proactive, Preventive Culture

This survey ascertains compliance with Care and Services for a Resident with Dementia. Become familiar with the survey, surveyor worksheets and, most importantly, best practices. Learn to view “behaviors” as communication; recognize dementia-related communications; be individual-centered, not institution centered as CMS requires; offer meaningful engagement by all staff all day to reduce antipsychotics. It’s time to create a proactive, preventive, individualized, resident -focused dementia care culture (All day.)

Validation® - Truly Successful Communication with Persons with Dementia

Learn how the Validation® method gives a means for successfully communicating with persons with dementia, something desperately needed by them, their caregivers and family members. Validation replaces the outmoded and person-devaluing methods of redirection, diversion, reality orientation, and the therapeutic lie. Validation teaches how to “exquisitely listen,” empathize, “move into” the disoriented person’s world and validate feelings. Using Validation boosts self-esteem, builds trust and rapport and often assists the person to no longer need to resort to the past by creating a warm and welcoming present. Learn also the value of Validation groups in which members not only “rise to the occasion” of their individual roles but their intuitive wisdom often spills out to help one another. (All day.)

Using theNew Dining Practice Standards and Toolkit to Excel in Dining

The new Dining Practice Standards were released in 2011. The Standards have been agreed upon by 12 clinical standard setting organizations and recognized by CMS. A second Task Force has developed a Toolkit of model policies and procedures, brochures for families and residents and other tools to help teams operationalize the Standards such as an Informed Choice form. Come learn the Standards, the evidence-based research that backs them, how they were built upon CMS nursing home requirementsand about the new tools now available from the facilitator of both the Creating Home II symposium and subsequent task forces. Be inspired to use the new standards to keep improving yours. (Best as an all day workshop.)

Changing Institutional Culture with Little Money and Worry about Regulations

Can an institutional setting be changed with no – or very little – money? Can person-directed practices be implemented without worry about regulations? If either of these concerns have concerned you come be encouraged and reminded that changing institutional culture can be done without money and how many culture change principles and values can be incorporated into your culture without any link to regulations. In fact, focusing on the persons in your care and those who care for them will actually enhance your compliance with regulatory requirements. (90 min.)

The New Negative Outcome from Not Honoring Choice – Surplus Safety

If you live in a nursing home with an “ordered” restricted diet and told “you can’t eat that” for, say, ten years, what kind of harm does that cause? The Hippocratic Oath is “do no harm,” but are we? In her background paper for the Creating Home II food and dining symposium written under contract with CMS, C. Bowman fleshes out this concept of new negative outcome. Ponder it with us along with surplus safety developed by Drs. Ronch and Thomas, the right to folly, the reasonable person concept, the requirement to honor choices and research that shows how the opportunity to make choice contributes to brain health. There are positive outcomes from being given choice as well as negative outcomes from not being given choice that not many people are talking about. (90 minute session)

Living a Life Full of Choices

Since 1987 federal regulation has required nursing homes to honor resident choice. In 2009 CMS issued new guidance reiterating this requirement for choice in waking, retiring, eating and bathing. Institutional living is often known for lack of choice. Unfortunately, institutional ways can creep into even less institutional settings. Be challenged to offer choice in every aspect of living whether you serve people in independent living, adult day services, assisted living, nursing homes or the rehab setting. Most people are used to self-directed living, making choices all day long – it should be no different no matter where we live. (90 minutes)

Good Care should be a Given

Quality of life includes quality of care. In your community, do residents get to the bathroom when they need to? Better yet are residents' bathroom needs anticipated? In addition to the obvious benefits, this also leads to preventing falls. Is mouth care happening regularly every day? Are medications administered according to residents' schedules? And is sleep honored according to the person's circadian rhythm? Only then can a resident achieve highest practicable well-being. This is not only a great idea but also a federal requirement. (60-90 min.)

The Power of Language to Create Culture: What culture does your languagecreate?
It is not news that the language of institutional carecould usesome work. Even CMS notes a needed language changeby encouraging the elimination oflabels such as “feeder” in its interpretive guidance for requirement for dignity. Do these institutional words still abide in your culture? Facility, beds, frontline, work the floor, toileting, non-compliant, behaviors, difficult, activities, dietary, resident, elope, expire? Have you personally and community-wide adopted language that is softer, more normal, dignified? The best news? Changing language costs no money. Yes, changing language is a no-cost practice that does wonders to shift from an institutional culture to a home/natural/normal culture instead. Join us to learn more about the unintended consequences of traditional institutional language; word replacements to consider; and ideas on how to change language. Join our hostess Carmen Bowman as she shares from the paper she co-authored The Power of Language to Create Culture. (90 plus)

Honoring Nurses through Culture Change

Culture change brings with it many new and unfamiliar practices compared to the traditional ways of providing nursing home care. Nurses often get a “bad rap” for not supporting new ideas when, in fact, nurses yearn for meaningful change but have been taught to tread carefully. Culture change practices will be shared with the responsibilities of the nurse in mind, showing how homes remain compliant with applicable regulations and how new practices actually meet federal requirements better than ever before! We will take a look at some of the things we do and say in long term care that are actually funny and don’t always make the most sense. Come laugh a little and be encouraged along your culture change journey. (Can be a 90 minute session.)

Artifacts of Culture Change

In April of 2006, CMS released a new culture change measurement tool called Artifacts of Culture Change. It was co-developed by Karen Schoeneman of CMS and Carmen Bowman of Edu-Catering: Catering Education for Compliance and Culture Change. The tool is designed to be used by an individual home to document concrete changes they have made that reflect the changed thinking of eliminating institution and creating home or, in other words, how “culture changed” they’ve become. Participants will learn how to use the Artifacts tool and become aware of culture change practices they may have not considered in shifting their focus from institutional to individual. (60 or 90 minutes.)

Building Relationships and Staff Retention – How They Go Together

“Relationship is the foundational building block of a transformed culture.” The Pioneer Network has identified this as a core value to culture change. There are many benefits to encouraging and promoting relationship between staff members, between residents and between staff and residents. Only in relationship can one truly be known; what you love and what you hate, your passions to your pet peeves, in the end this is all any of us want. Research shows that building relationships even results in decreased turnover and other positive outcomes. (60 minutes at the least, longer would offer experiential exercises.)

SOFTEN the Assessment Process

Frustrated with how institutional and awkward the assessment process is? Would you like to offer better for your residents? Learn how all professionals can strive to get to know someone “over coffee instead of over a form” and truly welcome people to their new home helping them through what might be the most traumatic event of their lives. Softening our practice and putting the resident back in the driver's seat of their life fits perfectly with the MDS 3.0 and its focus on resident voice and choice. Ideas shared come from the Action Pact workbook and training DVD with the same title co-authored by our guide. Ideas are for all professionals of all disciplines to soften all our assessment processes with softer practices such as:

Support Simple Pleasures

Offer Options

Foster Friendships

Tie-in to Tasks

Equalize Everyone

Normalize Now (Best as an all day workshop, can be condensed into 90 min.)

Is it Tang or is it Orange Juice? – What is True Culture Change?

“Oh, we do culture change.” But you see what you see and it still looks like an institution. It is easy to get a misperception of what “culture change” is. A company gives focus to a new dining practice and without any other exposure staff think that’s what culture change is. So what does it truly mean to change an institutional culture? It has more to do with principles than programs, individualized care than institutional care, high involvement than top down hierarchy, and residents being well known than anything else. (90 minutes or more.)

Oodles of Ideas on Overcoming Resistance to Change

Change – just the word implies hard work and the hair on the back of our necks stands straight up. We also know the many ideas to change institutional culture are good and we want to implement them but that too is hard work. So how do you get everyone “on board?” Come hear idea after idea and add to the collection of them as we learn from pioneers who have gone before us, brainstorm and encourage one another on this journey that does involve meaningful change.(60 or 90 minute session with lots of involvement.)

A Meaningful Day

Explore ideas for trading in the daily grind of institutional life for a vibrant daily home life from a new book co-authored by our speaker and LaVrene Norton of Action Pact entitled Vibrant Living. Many of the book’s ideas were prompted by studying Perham Memorial Home a nursing home in the Household Model where we learned that “programs” are just band aids; one-to-ones can’t sooth loneliness; activity programs often only fill time; and activity staff alone cannot truly engage people. It’s time to move on from “activity programming” to meaningful days with meaningful engagement, momentous moments and more. Be reminded of the requirement to identify each resident’s highest practicable level of psychosocial well-being, something not always done. Be exposed to ideas on how to be compliant with the requirement for Activities, and the expectation that basically all staff support resident activity interests by our presenter a former activity professional state and federal surveyor who served on the four year panel that developed the interpretive guidance. (All day workshop.)

Quality of Life: Delineating between Deficient Practice,

Common Practice and Culture Change Practice

For each of the federal Quality of Life regulations, deficient practice, common practice and culture change practice are identified and discussed. Regarding dignity, time is taken to discuss the common use of undignified language in institutions along with suggested more dignified replacements to consider. This session shares some of the content of a workbook with the same title which the speaker, a former surveyor, authored. After an introduction and examples from the speaker, participants will be asked to work together in small groups on various Quality of Life regulations to identify what is deficient practice, common practice and culture change practice and to share with the group at large. This has successfully been presented to providers and surveyors giving them neutral ground to work together. Just such a session in Rhode Island can be read about at

(Can be done as a 90 minute or longer session.)

The CMS Psychosocial Severity Outcome Guide and How to Put It to Good Use

On June 1, 2006, CMS issued it’s first-ever guide to surveyors on how to identify psychosocial outcomes and their severity of harm to long term care residents. Become very familiar with the Guide itself, hear examples of psychosocial harm, gather ideas for using the Guide with staff and learn how to be proactive in identifying and preventing psychosocial harm. (90 min. or longer.)

Regulatory Compliance and Culture Change

This session shares the content of a new culture change workbook which the speaker, a former surveyor, authored. Learn how the OBRA ‘87 regulations not only support culture change but how culture change actually embodies what the writers of OBRA ’87 intended.

  • A brief history of OBRA will be shared, including a clip from the movie When You Remember Me depicting life in a nursing home in the early 1970’s.
  • How many of the current federal regulations support culture change is explored.
  • Participants are placed in the role of surveyor in discussing common culture change practices and which regulations pertain to each.
  • State regulations, reminders, myths and tips regarding survey and culture change are shared. (Best as a 3 hour session or two 90 min. sessions.)

Culture Change and Assisted Living

Principles, practices and models of person-directed care will be explored with the assisted living setting in mind drawing from the Pioneer Network, the Eden Alternative, Planetree, Bathing without a Battle, Learning Circles, Community Meetings, neighborhoods, the household model and much more. Many ideas will be generated together and an overview given of culture change resources available and where to obtain them. (90 minute session or longer as more can be covered and time for group discussion.)

A Pep Rally for the Future of Aging in (states’ name)

We have much to celebrate in the culture change movement both nationally and in (state’s name). Although many tools for culture change are at hand, it is also easy to experience roadblocks and setbacks on this challenging journey, to be overwhelmed by the “YES, BUTS”. This (very good as a closing or opening) session will be a sharing of encouragement and enthusiasm to overcome those setbacks through a frank dialogue on how to move forward. Bring your “YES, BUT” questions, ideas as well as your unquenchable spirit for change to this, our own pep rally for change. (Best as a 60 or 90 minute keynote or endnote.)

Changing the Culture of Care Planning: a person-directed approach

The OBRA ’87 regulations have not only supported a person-directed approach but have