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Introducing Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST) within a care home is a promising strategy for enhancing your dementia-care offering. But therapy delivery doesn’t happen by magic: the training of your team is absolutely critical. In this article we focus on the question of training - who should be trained, what the training covers, how you access it, what the benefits are, and how training links to staff impact and resident outcomes.
At its core, CST relies on structured session design, skilled facilitation, participant engagement and appropriate adaptation to resident ability. If a session is delivered poorly, the risk is that it becomes just “another activity” rather than a therapeutic intervention. CST can be administered by anyone working with people with dementia - care workers, psychologists, occupational therapists or nurses. But the key phrase is “working with people with dementia” and this implies staff with sufficient skill, confidence and time to deliver.
For your care home, training staff in CST is not simply a useful extra - it is foundational to ensure that your investment in CST yields the outcomes you expect. If the sessions are run without fidelity to the manual or without proper facilitation skills, you may not deliver the cognitive benefits, thereby reducing return on investment and potentially risking disappointment from families, residents or regulators.
Training should start with staff who will be directly involved in delivering CST sessions - this may include your activity coordinator, dementia-lead, senior carer, or therapy facilitator. But you might also consider broader training for other care staff who support the sessions indirectly e.g., bringing residents to sessions, supporting participants, reinforcing skills outside the sessions. From a care-home leadership perspective it’s worth aligning training with your organisation’s dementia-care pathway: who leads your dementia care? Who designs your programme? Who monitors outcomes? Ensuring all of these people understand CST, even if they are not facilitators, is beneficial.
Ayla integrates training and delivery support into its platform package. The platform includes built-in guidance and training for facilitators alongside the 14-session CST programme. Your team also receive training from the Ayla team ahead of your programme roll-out.
Your team will learn the theory and evidence underpinning CST (why it works, what the research shows), the manual / content of CST sessions, facilitation skills (group dynamics, adapting for ability, engaging residents), communication skills (language, prompting, scaffolding), how to adapt sessions for physical or cognitive impairments, how to monitor and report outcomes, and how to embed CST within your care-home routine.
From a staff perspective, training in CST offers several advantages. Staff who feel confident in delivering structured therapeutic sessions tend to report greater job satisfaction, stronger sense of professional development, and improved engagement. When a care worker knows their sessions are supported by a manual, evidence base and digital tools, their confidence rises and they feel less reliant on “making it up”.
From a resident outcome perspective, better-trained facilitators lead to higher fidelity delivery of CST and thus stronger outcomes. For a care home, that means greater value from the investment in CST: better cognitive, mood and quality-of-life outcomes for residents, and the business benefits that flow from this: improved satisfaction, stronger marketing case, better occupancy, better regulation positioning.
After seven weeks of twice-weekly CST sessions delivered with Ayla our customers see improved cognitive outcomes by 47.8% in residents with mild to moderate dementia.
The evidence is clear that training matters if you want to deliver the benefits of CST. UCL reports that CST resulted in improvements in cognition and quality of life in a multi-centre randomized controlled trial of 201 people from 23 centres. The economic analysis showed the improvements compared favourably with cholinesterase inhibitors for Alzheimer’s disease.
In care-home settings when you have trained staff using defined digital delivery tools, you are more likely to replicate these outcomes - not just in pilot trials but in your home. From a business standpoint, that means you improve your chances of achieving quantifiable results, which can be shared with families, regulators, commissioners, rather than just “we do some activities”.
To embed CST in your home successfully you should plan your training as part of your overall introduction of CST. Here is a suggested sequence:
From a business perspective your investment is in training time, staff hours, and Ayla platform cost. The benefit is multi-fold: improved resident outcomes of better mood, cognitive engagement, communication, quality of life, which in turn support your home’s reputation, family satisfaction, referral pipeline. It also supports regulatory compliance, showing you deliver evidence-based dementia therapy, and can differentiate you in the market. Given CST’s evidence of improved cognition, quality of life and cost-effectiveness, the business case is strong.
Training your team in CST is one of the most critical steps in delivering this high-quality therapy in your care home. Without skilled facilitators, the therapy risks becoming diluted and the investment may not pay off. By choosing Ayla which embeds training and delivery support, you position your home for success.
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