Recommendations aim to ensure dementia care meets needs

Recommendations designed to ensure care provided to people living with dementia meets their needs have been launched as part of the Core Outcome Measures for Improved Care (COM-IC) project. The aim was to identify a set of key outcome measures collected during routine care and used to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions such as dignity, hygiene, pain and meaningful activities — according to the project’s Chief Investigator, Professor Tracy Comans from the University of Queensland’s (UQ) Centre for Health Services Research (CHSR).

“These will help ensure that the care provided meets the needs of people living with dementia, either at home with support services or in aged care,” Comans said. “To improve care, we need consistent, high-quality data on the support people with dementia receive, and one way to achieve this is through standardised measures.” Comans added: “Using the recommended measures ensures that care quality is evaluated in a clear and consistent way and with information that can be compared across different aged care services”.

Developed in consultation with a large group of stakeholders including care providers, people living with dementia and their families, researchers, policy makers and health care professionals, PhD candidate Danelle Kenny said the importance of carer education was one common and overlooked thread that gained clarity and traction over the life of the project. “While formal qualifications don’t necessarily translate to improved care, the lack of dementia-specific training can lead to breakdowns in communication and erodes the positive care relationships between those giving and receiving care,” Kenny said.

“For too long, health care has reduced patients to a collection of symptoms, labels and problems to be fixed and we need to move beyond this to see these issues in the context of the whole person,” Kenny added. “These recommendations have been primarily developed for the Australian Government to aid future policy review and development in aged care quality improvement, as well as for use by aged care providers who may review and modify current practices.

“These results could help shape better aged care policies and support more compassionate, person-centred care across Australia.”

With around two-thirds of people with dementia living at home with support services, while the rest live in residential aged care, more than 420,000 people are estimated to have dementia; and, UQ said, there is currently no requirement for mandatory reporting of outcomes relating to the provision or quality of care for people living with the disease. The COM-IC project’s recommendations are available here, on the CHSR website.

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