Joao Partel Araujo was not satisfied with the health-care answers he was getting when his grandfather was diagnosed with dementia in 2006.

“I heard answers of ‘There’s nothing we can do.’ ‘This is how it is.’ ‘It’s a progressive disease,’” Partel Araujo remembered. “I felt very unsatisfied with this, thinking ‘This can’t be the end for millions of people.’”

A nurse, Partel Araujo thought there was something out there he didn’t know about care. He went into geriatrics care and went from his home in Portugal to different countries, working in different contexts.

When working with a senior, the person would often not understand Partel Araujo, not recognize him or refuse his care.

“I’d be frustrated, the person would be frustrated, and, in the end, feeling bad about it, you go to your colleagues and to your supervisors and you ask, ‘What can I do?’ and all they say is ‘Do your best.’

“I was doing my best and my best wasn’t good enough for this kind of job. I started to consider maybe I’m not good enough for this kind of job.”

He began to weave his way out of geriatrics and started seeking another degree. One day in 2010, he met Yves Gineste, one of the authors of “Humanitude”, a book about providing relationship-centered care for seniors.

“I went to France without speaking French just to see what Humanitude was, where’s the magic?” Partel Araujo questioned. “It sounded too good to be true.”

What the Portuguese nurse found was a “very precise, very, very structured, very applicable” health-care program.

“I came back, and it did work,” he said.

Joao Partel Araujo

A year later, Partel Araujo was a Humanitude trainer.

He will bring that training to the North Suburban Senior Center in Northfield on Friday in a public workshop, “Humanitude: Breakthrough International Care Techniques.” Another session will also be held Nov. 1 in Glendale Heights.

Partel Araujo will talk about his experiences with the more than 150 techniques in the Humanitude care methodology.

“We are relationship centered, so we try to connect with a person before anything else,” Partel Araujo said. “We understand that care is an exchange between two human beings. The person has their background, has their beliefs, has their set of skills, habits, preferences, desires.

“Many times, within health care it is reduced to needs and to a very one-sided relationship. It’s very uneven.”

He said Humanitude tries to professionalize the relationship because “we believe that relationship is fundamental to providing good care.”

Partel Araujo said that too often caregivers are left to use their own intuitions in dealing with an elderly patient. He said caregivers need to professionalize the relationship with patients, especially when dealing with language, age and cultural differences.

“For humans, it’s hard to generally connect with someone who we don’t know, with strangers, and every day we’re dealing with strangers and on top of it (caregivers) are preparing for people who

might have trouble communicating, expressing their feelings, and if you’re not very highly trained to understand what they need, what they’re trying to tell you, then very quickly you can escalate this into a conflict relationship and care becomes a struggle.”

He said it is not uncommon to see caregivers unhappy with their role and disconnected from their patients because of that struggle.

“We as human beings we survive because we care for each other from a young age until we pass away,” Partel Araujo said. “Even after, we are remembered and cared for and longed for.

“It is strange that caregiving, which is such a fundamental baseline for human survival, is becoming contradictory, a struggle, and a conflict between caregivers and people receiving care. We try to make it more humane, more dignifying, more professional. It is not just an ideology. We do supply the caregivers with the techniques on how to approach the person, how to interact with the person, very precise techniques.”

Friday’s Humanitude session will be from 3-4:30 p.m. in the Cohen Auditorium at the North Suburban Senior Center, 161 Northfield Road, Northfield. To register, go to https://survey.zohopublic.com/zs/HSBqxo.

kbeese@chronicleillinois.com