About CARES® Serious Mental Illness™

The CARES® Serious Mental Illness™ Online Training Program focuses on how you can develop care strategies for those with serious mental illness and how it differs from dementia.

For many years, the centers for Medicare and Medicaid services has led a national effort to reduce the use of antipsychotic medications, especially for people living with dementia. But there are appropriate uses of antipsychotics. By definition, they are designed to help people with serious mental illnesses such as major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder. This program does a deep dive into each of these illnesses, and provides helpful strategies for caring for people living with a serious mental illness who may be in your care.

This program has 4 modules (4 hours). The modules include:

1. Introduction to Serious Mental Illness
2. Understanding Serious Mental Illness
3. Living with Serious Mental Illness
4. The CARES® Approach and Providing Appropriate Care

About CARES® Dementia Certification™

CARES Dementia Certification recognizes and tests a user’s dementia understanding and dementia care knowledge from the Alzheimer’s Association Dementia Care Practice Recommendations and published CARES research studies of select CARES online dementia care training programs. Organizations are encouraged to advertise their use of CARES certification to help promote their businesses. CARES Dementia Certification is optional and is included at no additional cost with the purchase of CARES Serious Mental Illness. Successful completion of the exam recognizes users for being educated about dementia and for being trained and certified in person-centered dementia care practices using the CARES® Approach. Learn more about CARES Dementia Certification.

Other Benefits

CARES Serious Mental Illness offers additional benefits such as:

1. Free CARES® Worksheets for each training module
2. Free continuing education self-submit packets for professional staff members
3. Cost-saving purchasing options for single sites
4. Flexible purchasing options for multi-location organizations

CARES Administrative Portal access

With any site license purchase, you will receive access to our CARES Administrative Portal to:

1. Manage training compliance.
2. Evaluate the individual progress of all staff members.
3. Run customized reports for any time period.
4. Download detailed documentation including employee name, module status, and date of program completion.
5. Print individual completion certificates for group training sessions.