Hi! I saw your post earlier this month--sorry it has taken me so long to respond. I’m excited that you are looking for ways to incorporate visual and communication supports for your nursing home residents. I have a couple of thoughts about creating communication boards for any resident to use. 1. Communication tools tend to be the most effective when they are personalized. The messages you mention would certainly be appropriate for most of the residents but I wonder if it would be hard to teach them how to use the board without some specific, highly motivating messages for each resident. 2. Would the residents be able to access the boards all the time? I wonder if they would miss out on communication opportunities because the boards aren’t accessible or a staff member isn’t accessible to see what they are pointing to. I wonder if you could try creating personalized boards for 1-2 residents that could be in the bag on their walker, their wheelchair, or even hung by their room door so they can grab them when leaving the room. Like I said above, some of the messages would be the same but a few would be more personalized—with pictures of special people or about favorite activities. You could use your therapy time to teach the residents how to use the boards. Once the staff sees how useful the communication boards can be they will want other residents to have them. Hopefully by having some consistent messages with a few personalized messages it wouldn’t be too much work on your part! Please let me know what you end up doing! Kristin

Hi, I'm new to this group and just read whitfk's question. I have the same question, plus have an idea that I would like to implement in a nursing home I work in. I'm wondering if anyone has ever done anything like this: I'd like to create communication boards that can be hung on the wall, with velco pix next to the boards, which would represent people's basic needs (I'm hungry, I'm bored, I am having a guest visit me today, etc.). The ideas is that residents can go over to the board, and choose a picture to show to a staff member, or point to one, and then a staff member could answer the resident's need. Or even have a simple conversation. It's too cumbersome for each resident to have his/her own board, which is why I thought of this "general" approach. What do you all think? Thanks!