Join Dementia Research

As part of Dementia Action Week, we would like to talk about some of the work our Humbelievable teams are involved in, in association with Dementia awareness and research.

 

Our dedicated Research and Development team are involved in a variety of studies throughout the year and actively work with our communities to improve research and engagement in dementia studies.

 

The Join Dementia Research animation video is a good place to start if you would like to learn more about the national efforts that we are involved in.

 

As part of the team’s initiatives, we proudly work with members of our communities and key players in the local area to help raise awareness and share lived experiences to help support others.

 

Wendy Mitchell is an amazing lady living with dementia and author of two Times best-selling dementia books, she works together with our teams frequently and has agreed to speak at our upcoming Annual Research Conference on 3 November 2022, which we are all very pleased about as her stories of lived experience are simply inspiring.

 

In addition, we have a lovely research participant, Sue Long, who works with us to promote dementia research. You can watch her story here.

 

Further to this, our Older People’s Mental Health teams have recently had two papers focused on dementia published in The British Psychological Society.

 

The first one is ‘Family support during inpatient psychiatric admissions for people with dementia’ Rebecca Dunning and Dr Emma Wolverson.

 

“The work of Maister Lodge has always included offering support to families, as the events before an admission and an inpatient admission itself are often emotionally challenging times for the families of people with dementia. During the pandemic, this support has been adapted to provide families with consistency and we gathered feedback from families about this support. The feedback highlighted the importance of good communication and feeling supported within an open and honest relationship with the ward, allowing relatives to continue to feel involved in the care of their loved ones.”

 

The second paper is ‘Service evaluation of a dementia training & support package into care homes’ by Lucy Reading and Dr Sara Appleyard.

 

“A care home team at our Trust’s Older People’s Mental Health Service designed a brief dementia training package based on understanding challenging behaviours which was trialled into six care homes in Hull.

 

Behaviours that challenge which commonly occur in people with dementia are difficult for care home staff, many of whom have no direct career paths and limited training opportunities, to understand and manage. Over 100 care home staff attended the training and feedback was extremely positive with 100 per cent of participants agreeing that the training was useful for their development, they learnt new knowledge and could apply their learning. Staff were also offered support following the training session to help embed learning into practice.

There was a 54 per cent reduction in total referrals to the local community mental health team in the 12-months post-training compared to the 12-months preceding from the participating care homes. The paper also discusses challenges to implement training into care homes during the Covid-19 pandemic as well as giving consideration to potential future developments.”

 

You can access the two articles as part of the journal, here.

 

We hope you will join us in dementia research, and with this year’s dementia action theme of ‘diagnosis’, it would be a real achievement if our efforts could encourage even just one person to reach out for support sooner.