Around 850,000 people in the UK have dementia, with numbers set to rise as our population ages.聽 Ensuring that all people with dementia receive high quality, compassionate care from diagnosis through to end of life is a real challenge for our health and care services 鈥� and one which collaborative research can make a significant contribution to.
Researchers at 蜜桃AV, funded by the , have been working with local care homes in Dorset to explore the issue of helping people with dementia in care homes to eat and drink well.聽 Weight loss is very common in people with dementia and can have a serious impact on their overall physical and mental well-being.聽 By working together with local care homes, Dr Jane Murphy (Associate Professor) and Joanne Holmes (Lecturer in Nutrition) have developed brand new training resources for all staff responsible for care to ensure that people with dementia eat and drink well.聽
They will be presenting these resources and insights into their research project at the in London on 12 April; a series of conferences designed to support the government鈥檚 vision of creating a society聽聽 where everyone with dementia receives high quality care by 2020.
鈥淲e are delighted to be able to share our resources and knowledge gained from our research project at the Dementia 2020 conference,鈥� says lead researcher, Dr Jane Murphy.
鈥淓nsuring people with dementia are eating and drinking well is a really important part of providing excellent, high quality care,鈥� continues Dr Murphy, 鈥淎s dementia progresses, it can become increasingly difficult for people to sense their thirst and hunger or to communicate their needs, which means there鈥檚 a real risk of people becoming malnourished or losing a lot of weight.聽 This can then have knock-on effects for their overall health and wellbeing.鈥�
鈥淭hanks to generous support from the Burdett Trust, we鈥檝e been able to work with local care homes, care staff and people with dementia to explore the issue and develop training tools.聽 We know that care staff are extremely busy and taking time to travel to training sessions can be difficult, so we have designed a and that can be used at any time,鈥� explains Dr Murphy.
鈥淭he training tools explain why ensuring good nutrition is essential and provides practical tips for how staff can support people to eat and drink as part of their person-centred care. 聽These range from getting to know people鈥檚 personal preferences, ideas for encouraging people to drink enough, developing appealing menus and聽 even improving the environment for meal times,鈥� says Dr Murphy, 鈥淲orking collaboratively with care staff was essential to developing these resources as we were able to draw on the expertise of and best practice used by frontline-staff.鈥�
