Improving outcomes for dementia care in acute aged care: impact of an education programme

The aim of this paper is to report on the transformation of a small local

hospital offering, for the first time, an acute geriatric service. At the start

of this process in 2005 it became evident that many of the staff were

inexperienced in providing care to older patients, specifically, and most

obviously, in the area of dementia care. Previously, the clinical focus had

been on medical and surgical care and the staff therefore needed to develop

a new range of skills and knowledge.

A practice development process was adopted to transform the service

with the overall aims of: developing and implementing a staff education programme to meet the

needs of the staff and patients.

This involved using a survey to gather baseline data about the level of

dementia competence and developing a dementia educational programme.

In this paper, we present the evaluation of this dementia educational

programme and its impact on knowledge in a new specialist aged care

clinical setting.