Do you have a strategy for providing Dementia Care Training for your staff?
The word dementia is an umbrella term which describes a serious deterioration in mental functions, such as memory, language, orientation and judgement. In dementia, brain cells stop working properly. This happens inside specific areas of the brain, which can affect how a person thinks, remembers and communicates. There are over 100 different types of dementia, the most common being Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies.
Dementia is a major cause of ill-health, affecting 820,000 people in the UK – a number rising daily. The majority of those affected are in residential care. How best to care for these people who already have degenerative mental illness and how to pay for caring for them, with that number projected to double in the next 30 years, is an increasingly difficult topic.
People with dementia can be subjected to huge inequalities in standards of residential care. Training your care staff in Dementia could enable residential care staff improve their understanding of Dementia and improve the quality of life for many service users.
It is important to see a skilled and effective workforce in place to support people with dementia. Your dementia training strategy should have clear aims to improve the quality of care for people with dementia as well as objectives to ensure staff are well informed and have the best possible skills to help them to work with people with dementia.
Improving training is essential so working with training providers to raise the standard of both basic skills and the process of continuous professional and vocational development is a must for the care sector.