The sector has always had people who understood the value of meaningful engagement. What changes everything is when that knowledge stops living in one person’s head.
The home sits in a farming region of Victoria. A lot of residents have spent their lives on the land. Most of the staff know that if someone grew up around animals, the fastest way to reach them, on a difficult morning, in a difficult moment, is usually through that.
Suzannah, the home’s Lifestyle and Wellbeing Lead, had that insight long before SilVR arrived. What changed when the headsets came in was that she finally had a way to act on it at scale, for every resident, on every shift, regardless of who was rostered.
That distinction, between holding knowledge personally and building it into a system, is what separates this home’s VR program from most. In the time since becoming SilVR’s original trial site for the group, the home has delivered more than 3,000 hours of VR. It runs seven days a week, all day, across every unit. Staff sign their names against the headset roster each morning, not because they are told to, but because they know which residents to take it to.
“It’s a tool,” Suzannah says.
“And you will get so much benefit from it if you invest the time.”
The Life Story Captured Before the First Session
The first thing Suzannah’s team did, before they worried about sessions or schedules, was build knowledge. Every resident who comes into the home, including respite stays, gets a detailed personal profile completed within the first eight days. The process starts at pre-admission, before the resident has set foot in the building.
“When we do pre-admission, I tell families about the VR program and say, ‘Tell me about your loved one. Where have they been? What do they love?'” Suzannah explains. “Even if the life story is virtually empty, once you get people talking, they’ll go, ‘Oh yeah, he went to Vietnam and he really loved it. I remember now.’ So you’re writing that down. You’ve got places to go with it before they’re even here. You’ve got a head start.”
That profile covers life history, career, interests, places they have been, and things they love. It is not held by one person. It is available to every member of the team, every shift. Personal care assistants use it. Staff who have never met a resident before can pick up the headset, look at the profile, and deliver a session that means something to that specific person.
“We wanted not just us to use it, but for PCA staff to use it,” Suzannah says. “So we had a user guide, and we made it easy to read for anyone to pick up and be able to use.”
This is the model that for-purpose providers are beginning to formalise. SilVR Pathways builds the same infrastructure digitally, capturing each resident’s life story, preferences, cultural background and interests, and making that knowledge available to every staff member on every shift, across every site.
When the Profile Becomes a De-escalation Tool
The program’s deepest value shows up before a situation escalates. In a dementia unit, the window between settled and distressed can close quickly. The skill is recognising the signs early and knowing exactly what to reach for.
“It’s the micro expressions. It’s the movements. It’s when somebody who’s sitting down suddenly starts to push themselves up,” Suzannah says. “That’s the moment where you go over, stand next to them, maybe touch their hand, give them a smile. Get them talking. And then you can lead on to VR.”
One resident came into the home in its opening week after her husband died suddenly before they could move in together. She was living with dementia, caught in what Suzannah describes as a tumbling trauma: remembering her husband, then forgetting, then remembering again. Her distress would build in visible cycles.
“You could see when it was starting,” Suzannah recalls. “And that was when you’d go over and say, ‘Let’s go to China. Let’s have a look at India.’ She grew up on a farm. She loved animals. You could de-escalate her very easily. We knew what she liked. It was in her profile.”
SilVR may support provider-led non-pharmacological strategies. For this resident, the approach gave staff a consistent option they could deploy in the moments before distress escalated, reducing trauma for the resident and incidents for the team.
“Your SIRs are going to reduce, all by wellbeing there to de-escalate the problem,” Suzannah says. “It saves trauma for the person, but it also saves staff.”
The approach only works because the knowledge exists before the moment arrives. When a resident’s preferences, history and triggers are documented and shared, any staff member can act on them. When they exist only in one person’s memory, the window closes before anyone can find the right experience.
Beyond Behaviour Support: VR as Everyday Escape
Not every use case involves changed behaviour. Pauline, a resident living with breast cancer, is cognitively well. She attends meals, but does not seek out social activity. What she seeks out is the headset.
“We found VR with her was taking her to a place where she wasn’t thinking about her health,” Suzannah says. “She often requests it. She sends us little thank you cards for being able to help her think about something else.”
For residents who are wheelchair-bound, the team spins them slowly through an experience, giving them a sense of movement they cannot otherwise access. During infection control periods, the headsets go room to room. When COVID anxiety keeps residents reluctant to re-engage with communal spaces, the team uses VR in small groups as a stepping stone back, graduating from two or three residents to larger gatherings.
“It’s escapism,” Suzannah says. “It takes them out of the environment they’re in and puts them somewhere they can imagine. It’s not the ocean. It’s not where they visited on their honeymoon. But we can take them there partially, and give them that sense of it. ‘That’s the closest I’m going to get.'”
When One Home’s Approach Becomes Every Home’s Starting Point
The home hit its target of 3000 hours of VR use per week across every unit. Three thousand hours later, the program has expanded across the organisation’s homes in VIC, NSW, QLD and WA, with Suzannah’s site now the reference model for homes beginning the journey.
“We were invested,” she says. “We had talked to management and said one of the things we don’t want is this equipment sitting on the shelf gathering dust. So we put everything into it.”
What the team built is the infrastructure that defines what a genuine program looks like: profiles started before admission, knowledge shared across every shift, staff trained to read behaviour and respond to it. The organisation is now exploring SilVR Pathways to bring that same model to newer homes that are building their programs from scratch.
“For the newer homes, this is all new to them,” Suzannah says. “It would be good.”
The headset sign-on board in Suzannah’s office still fills up each morning. Her team of ten know which residents to take it to. They know because it is available in the profile for everyone, on every shift. That is not a lifestyle activity, it’s a care pathway.
“This sits with them for a while,” Suzannah says. “They’ll tell their families. It’s a tool that helps residents journey wherever they want to go.”
