Medical students commonly perceive persons with dementia as being challenging to work with.
"We currently lack effective drugs for dementia, and there's a sense that these are cases where students can't do much to benefit the patient," George said. "The perception is that they're hard to extract information from, you don't know if that information is reliable, and there are often other complicated medical issues to deal with."TimeSlips is a non-pharmacological approach to dementia care that uses creative storytelling in a group setting and encourages participants to use their imagination rather than focusing on their inability to remember chronologically. Pictures with a staged, surreal image - for example, an elephant sitting on a park bench - are shared with all participants, who are encouraged to share their impressions of what is happening in the picture. As part of George's elective, medical students spent one month facilitating TimeSlips with groups of five to 10 residents and helping the residents build stories in poem form during their interactions.