Snoezelen activity: the Good Shepherd Nursing Home experience.

Care of the resident with dementia can be both challenging and unpredictable. Activities provided for nursing home residents often have rules and may be a source of frustration for residents with advancing dementia. Snoezelen, or multisensory therapy, offers a failure-free activity in an enabling environment that can both stimulate and relax the resident with dementia. Good Shepherd Nursing Home in Versailles, Mo, undertook a 1-year outcome-based quality improvement project to find if use of Snoezelen therapy could reduce the number of behavioral symptoms that residents were suffering from. While there are still barriers to the use Snoezelen therapy, employees at Good Shepherd Nursing Home believe that the use of Snoezelen therapy has been a successful and rewarding experience for both residents and staff members.