1. The National Dementia Declaration lists seven outcomes that the DAA are seeking to achieve for people with dementia and their carers. How would you describe your organisation’s role in delivering better outcomes for people with dementia and their carers?

At Home Instead Senior Care we promote choice and enable people with dementia and their carers to have control over the decisions that affect them by ensuring they are an integral part of our care consultation process. All of our care plans include extensive and continuous input from our clients and their families, which ensures we understand them well and enables us to adapt our support according to their changing needs. The development of such a close and trusting relationship enables our clients to remain in their own homes and pursue an active role in their community, enjoying the best quality of life. Our Caregivers receive ongoing training including our City & Guilds accredited Dementia Care programme, enabling them to support our clients with even the most complex needs and if required through their end of life journey. We also provide our own free public education workshops for family members of a loved one with dementia to give them the tools and knowledge to provide better support. Furthermore, when a client’s or carer’s needs require we provide information and signposting to other services and work in partnership with relevant professionals to support them. Finally, on an international level our organisation invests in and undertakes research programmes to “change the face of ageing”.

2. What are the challenges to delivering these outcomes from the perspective of your organisation?

Lack of awareness and understanding about dementia can mean people are not able to access relevant services such as Home Instead in the early stages of their diagnosis, when it is most important. Therefore, raising awareness of dementia amongst the general public and health and social care professionals and raising the profile of services such as ours are crucial to delivering the outcomes of the National Dementia Declaration. In order to do this we need to be able to roll out a flexible, informative public education programme that is relevant to each audience, which we feel working with the Dementia Action Alliance can be achieved. The provision of high quality and ongoing dementia care and statutory training for our Caregivers is a costly and time consuming process. Additionally it can be hard to release Caregivers from their roles to undertake the training, which is often at least one full working day. We need to develop a more flexible approach to offering and delivering ongoing training to our Caregivers. Communication with local health and social care providers can be difficult due to our commercial position, which feel is a barrier to families we could support.

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