The Meaning of Me®

A Canadian blueprint for addressing the complex whole that is the person at the centre of the community based home care services model.

Mosaic’s blue print for Person Centred Care extends the notion that care based services should be implemented collaboratively with the individual and their families to one that also embraces the voice and the rich habitat of the mind and the being of the person being cared for. It is one that is also especially sensitive to the importance of community, the person’s place in the community and the wider dynamic that encompasses a person’s many dimensions of being. In this sense the model is one that delivers personal support and medical care along well defined client centered protocols differentiated by a fluid organic relationship core.  Not only is the client front and centre in the relationship but the care provider itself develops a wider set of relationships with the community.

At a fundamental level, The Meaning of Me is a conversational framework that becomes an interactive journey between all those involved in the care relationship. It differs in many meaningful respects from other similarly framed interventions paying attention to, as Daniel Kahneman would say, the remembering self and the experiencing self: to remember, to create to positive experience. It is also a framework very much aware of the dynamics of interaction and the processes required to provide the necessary creative space and loop back to the client. At one level, it is simple and easy to execute, but it is through the doors that it opens that the potential lies.

Much of the inspiration for the development of the model came from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, A Better Life-What Older People with High Support Needs Value (Jeanne Katz et al, 2011).

The talk will discuss how the service model is framed and delivered, how it interacts with the person being cared for and how an organisation can tailor specific services that interact with the greater focus on the person. It will also address key organisational platforms needed to deliver care within the complex whole. The talk will also address issues of costs and funding for such services as barriers to the development of holistic services and how these could possibly be addressed.

The community based model for care that places the individual front and centre in the relationship, while also preserving the necessary duality of professionalism and the personal is a complex one. As the growing literature and, indeed, much of the empirical work confirms, a failure to embrace the many inputs that impact both physical and mental well-being is expensive not just financially but costly for society as a whole, and at times devastating for the individual.

Mosaic presented on October 20th, 2016 for the Senior Citizen’s Organization Symposium “Overcoming Loneliness & Social Isolation: How Mosaic’s Model of Care helps meet identified social and emotional needs of older adults within its care Celebrating Best Community Practices”

“Overcoming Loneliness and Social Isolation: Celebrating Best Community Practices”: How Mosaic’s model of care helps meet identified social and emotional needs of older adults within its care.”