Proficiency proves one caregiver can do the work. The Lead Track is for the person who makes the method belong to your agency: the supervisor, nurse or trainer who runs the practice sessions, reads the field notes, scores Proficiency and turns what a caregiver wrote on Tuesday into how the client is cared for by Friday. It earns Dementia Steady Lead, and it is how the method keeps working after we leave.
Every dementia training decays without reinforcement, and the person who can reinforce it is already on your payroll. A trainer who visits twice a year cannot open a practice session with what your caregivers wrote last week, cannot read a field note the morning it comes in, and cannot rewrite a client's shift guide after a fall. Your own Lead can. The track exists so that nothing in the program depends on Dementia Steady being in the room.
It also answers a rule. Illinois asks that the person who supervises dementia care staff has either completed a dementia training curriculum or has five years of experience in the work. Every Lead completes Groundwork before the track begins, so a Lead meets that requirement by curriculum, and Groundwork's Certificate of Completion is the record.
The core of the track is the same for everyone. The endorsement names what you are being trusted to run.
A scheduler, care manager, nurse, trainer or director of nursing who holds Groundwork's caregivers to the standard and keeps them there. One Lead is enough for a small agency; a larger operation trains two or more.
A social worker, chaplain, librarian, first responder trainer, senior center director or experienced family caregiver who wants to teach the method where families and frontline staff already gather.
Four jobs. The track teaches each one by doing it, on the same three fictional clients your caregivers know from Groundwork.
Six 70-minute sessions, each built on one Groundwork module, run in pairs with a brief for the partner playing the client and a second attempt when the first approach does not land. Every session opens on what the room wrote in their reflections and on what happened when they tried last session's commitment, and closes with one specific thing each caregiver will do on one specific visit. Three sessions a year cover the annual advanced hours Illinois asks for; six is a full run for a new team.
The track teaches the facilitation itself: hold the silence after an exercise, let the room name the move before you do, read every reflection before you open, and protect the commitment round even when you are running long. Every session has a verbatim script for its hardest moments and a same-day prep sheet, so a first-time Lead is never starting from a blank page.
Every Groundwork field task and every observation note comes to the Lead. The Lead approves each one before a certificate is issued, and flags the ones that describe a change in a client, new pain, a bruise, a fall, for a report the same day whether or not a course asked for it. The note is the product; the Lead is the person who reads it as evidence rather than anecdote.
One unseen scenario, six answers, five dimensions scored 0 to 3 against written anchors, and three gates a strong total cannot buy past: the body checked before the story, a reach that does not argue, and a note the next person can act on. The track calibrates you against reference scores before you score alone, and during the beta two scorers compare on every response. It also teaches the two conversations that follow a miss: the twenty-minute coaching conversation and the second form within 14 days, or the one-page development plan and a shadowed visit.
The reassessment opens on what caregivers observed, in their words, before it opens on anything else, on your own cadence and always after a fall, a hospitalization or a significant change. From it, the shift guide is rewritten: three things to know, three to do, three to watch for, each with an action and a time, so a stranger could act on every line in their first ten minutes. Once a quarter the Lead runs a twenty-minute huddle, one scenario read aloud, the room's readings on a whiteboard, one field card revisited, one commitment each. Once a month a five-minute scenario goes to every caregiver who holds Proficiency. The track gives you the templates and shows you how to run the loop with whatever review your agency already does, whether or not anything in the building is called a care plan summary.
The shape below is the plan the first beta will settle. Numbers here are the design, not a promise.
Community Leads take the same first three steps, then run the 60-minute workshop once, observed, in place of the practice session. Both endorsements carry a Certificate of Completion naming the hours and the topics, and the Lead is entered in the register beside the caregivers they will score.
Everything a Lead needs to run the program exists already, because it is what has run the cohorts to date. Nothing has to be written from scratch.
An Agency Lead is trained under the agency's Groundwork license, which is per agency, by headcount, for a year at a time. The Lead's materials are licensed for use inside that agency, with its own staff. A Community Lead licenses the workshop and the family materials for use in the community, at cost that stays low on purpose, because the family side of Dementia Steady is free and stays free. Pricing for both is published when the track opens. Until then, the free workshop and ten free Steady Check sittings are the place to start, and a supervisor who wants to see the loop before committing can request a walk-through of the supervisor orientation.
The Lead Track opens after the first Groundwork beta. Leave your details and you will hear once, when it opens, with the pricing and the first cohort dates. Nothing else.