New App available

People have been asking us for ages if our highly popular suite of environmental assessment tools could be made available in an online rather than paper-based version, and we’re really excited to announce that an App is now available!

Originally developed as part of The King’s Fund’s Enhancing the Healing Environment programme, the suite of tools was reviewed and refreshed by the Association for Dementia Studies (ADS) in 2020 and expanded to include a tool for gardens and outdoor spaces in 2021. We’re pleased to say that an article we wrote about the review/refresh process has recently won an ‘Outstanding Paper’ award in the 2023 Emerald Literati Awards!!

Can you help?

Here at the Association for Dementia Studies we are always coming up with ideas for future research that we’d like to do, but it’s really important that there’s a good reason for the research rather than us just going off and doing our own thing! When we’re working on funding bids, it’s useful to get input and feedback from all relevant parties involved to make sure we’re looking at the right things. This is often called PPI (patient and public involvement) or sometimes PPPIE (patient, public and practitioner involvement and engagement), but basically means getting people involved in how research is planned and conducted rather than just seeing people as research participants.

That’s a really long-winded way of asking for your help. We’re working on a funding bid for a future research project and need some input. If you work in a care home and have experience of using environmental assessment tools to make changes to your environment, we would love to hear from you. We are inviting you to share your experiences in a short anonymous survey to get a feel for how such tools are being used in practice and what sort of changes are being made to the environment as a result. Any information you provide in the survey will not be included in any research, but will help to inform our funding bid.

The Hennell Award 2022

Everyone at the Association for Dementia Studies (ADS) is driven by the priority to do all we can to enable people with dementia and their close family and friends to enjoy lives of quality. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Hennell Award.   

The Hennell Award for Innovation and Excellence in Dementia Care (to give it its full title!) was launched in memory of the late Brian Hennell at the ADS 5th birthday celebration event on 14 May 2014. Brian’s wife June has acted as an ambassador for this award which recognises people who have made a significant contribution to promoting person-centred care.

Anyone who has studied on one of our many courses can enter the award. This year we were able to shortlist three amazing and innovative applications – all very different, but each one focused on enhancing the lives of individuals whom the entrants supported. You can read about the entries on our webpages.

Stu Wright, who won this year’s Hennell Award, impressed the judging panel with his “real-life plans and actions for improvement within care homes”, and his focus upon human rights and the needs and aspirations of people living with advanced dementia. We’re very pleased that Stu will be joining us at the upcoming UK Dementia Congress to talk about his work as part of a symposium about our education, so if you’re at Congress please do come along to hear more and congratulate Stu on his achievement.

It is such a great pleasure to be involved with the Hennell Award, knowing that the education we provide can help make a considerable difference to people’s lives. It is fantastic to be able to recognise our students for the contribution they make.   

Details will be posted in December about arrangements for the Hennell Award 2022/23. We are looking forward to receiving more great applications and recognising the impressive things going on to promote person-centred care and support across the world!    

Get involved

At the moment we’ve got three opportunities for people to get involved with our research activities, and although we’ve covered them in previous blogs we thought we’d bring them together to remind you of them in one place. In no particular order…

Get Real with Meeting Centres survey

As described in our ‘What do you value about Meeting Centres?’ blog, we’re looking for family members, friends and/or carers of people affected by dementia who attend Meeting Centres. We want to know about their experiences of Meeting Centres and also what their preferences are, to help us in our work looking at the sustainability of Meeting Centres.

Do you fit the bill? Could you share your views with us as part of this project? If yes, please complete the survey here. We’ve been able to extend the deadline for this survey, so it’s not too late.

CHARM Framework manual

When we put out our blog ‘The CHARM Framework manual has taken off!’ back in March, it had been downloaded around 700 times, which was brilliant. It has now been downloaded just over 900 times(!!), and we’re really interested to find out how people are using it in practice and what they think of it. Although it’s been developed from work in care homes, it’s principles are applicable in different settings too, so hopefully some of those downloads are from people who work in non-care home settings.

Have you downloaded a copy of the CHARM Framework manual? Can you spare five minutes to give us some feedback or suggest where the manual could be improved? If so, you can access the survey here. There is no closing date for this survey so you can get involved at any point.

Worcester Life Stories

We’re evaluating the impact of the ‘Know Your Place’ and ‘Life Stories Herefordshire and Worcestershire’ platforms as part of our Worcester Life Stories project. You can find out more about the platforms in previous blogs such as ‘Revisiting two ‘new’ online platforms’, and you can also get involved. We’ve got two surveys open at the moment, one for each platform, to find out how people are using the platforms and what they’ve done as a result of using them. We realise that people need time to use the platforms before they can comment on them, so we’ve extended the deadline for a bit.

Have you had experience of using one or both platforms, either on your own or with others? Please click on the relevant link(s) below to get involved.

• Know Your Place Worcester
• Life Stories Herefordshire and Worcestershire

If you’re wondering whether or not to complete any of these surveys, here are a few bits of extra information:

• All of the surveys are anonymous.
• They are all quite short so shouldn’t take long to complete.
• The Worcester Life Stories surveys have full project information at the start to fulfil the ethics requirements for that project.

Also, every response we get really is important and could help us make a difference. If you can’t complete any of our surveys, feel free to pass on the information to someone else who can. Thank you!

Connect with ADS on twitter @DementiaStudies and on Facebook @adsuow

Did you see…?

We try to have a new blog post every week, but realise that it can be easy for some posts to be missed when life is busy or we’re caught up with work. Every now and again we like to take stock and do a quick recap of a few posts to give them a second chance to be seen. Here are the ones we’ve chosen this time:

• How to use the environmental assessment tools – If you’ve seen us talking about the different environmental assessment tools we’ve got, but aren’t quite sure how to use them in practice, this is a good blog to look at. Don’t forget though, that since this blog post was written we’ve now got the garden assessment tool as well.
• A roundup of the CHARM research projects – As part of the CHARM project multiple different research projects were carried out in care homes, and this handy blog post brings them all together in one post so you can see what went on. There’s also a link to the CHARM framework manual which you may find useful to have a copy of.
• Finding out what people value about Meeting Centres – We’ve currently got a survey open for family members and carers of people with dementia who attend Meeting Centres to help us find out what is important to them. Information about the survey and a link to complete it can be found in this blog post.
• Introducing CAMBUS – An initiative that started recently was the ‘Coffee and Memory Bus’ which is acting as a form of outreach for people with memory concerns in Herefordshire and Worcestershire. This blog post tells you more about what they offer and has a link to the website where you can find out where they’re going to be on what days.
• 12 resources you should know about – In the run-up to Christmas (that feels like ages ago!) we told you about a different resource every day on social media then brought them together in one blog post. A handy one to look at if you need a quick reminder of the resources we’ve been involved with. You might even find ones that you didn’t realise existed but are really useful for what you’re doing.

So if you missed any of these the first time round please do take a look, or maybe you just want to remind yourself what they were about.

Don’t forget, you can look through all of our old blog posts by scrolling down, or by clicking on one of the ‘categories’ to the right of the page to see all posts about different topics.

Connect with ADS on twitter @DementiaStudies and on Facebook @adsuow

The CHARM Framework: A step-by-step guide for care homes to conduct their own research projects

One of the main outputs from the CHARM (Care home action researcher-in-residence model) projects is a FREE interactive, downloadable step-by-step manual for conducting research in care homes. The CHARM Framework manual was created by Faith Frost, Dr Isabelle Latham and Professor Tracey Williamson.

The manual has been developed using the tools and experience gained from working with four care homes during the CHARM project and has been designed to be accessible for both new and experienced researchers! You can find out more about the CHARM project here.

The Hennell Award winner 2021

A few weeks ago at the University of Worcester graduation the latest winner of the Hennell Award for Innovation and Excellence in Dementia Care was announced. A huge congratulations go to Sue Ashcroft, who is the Approaches to Care Lead for Dementia and Lifestyle Services at Care UK.

Sue with Suzanne Mumford (Head of Nursing, Care and Dementia at Care UK), who nominated her for the award

CHARM – round-up of the research projects

If you follow our blog you may have noticed several posts relating to the CHARM project, which we haven’t actually told you about. While you might be thinking it was a bit rude of us not to make more of them, don’t worry, it was part of a wider plan and now is their time to shine. We needed the posts to be made available in the interim from a CHARM project perspective but wanted to ‘launch’ them all officially in on go, so we’ve been deliberately sneaking them out under the radar until now.

As part of the CHARM project four care homes have been conducting mini-research projects, and the following posts show what they have been up to, so please have a read through them:

Research Methods e-Festival: What is CHARM?

In this week’s blog Faith Frost talks about a recent presentation she was involved with last month. Over to Faith…

Hello!

It was the 2021 Research Methods e-Festival last month, organised by NCRM and methods@manchester. We were pleased to be able to present the fantastic work that the CHARM team had been doing, showcase some of our initial findings from the study, and answer some interesting questions!

Dr Isabelle Latham took the lead in presenting as the senior researcher on the project, whilst I was on hand to respond to the comments pane. Izzie gave a great overview of why the CHARM project was needed and what the CHARM framework is.

5 blogs you may have missed

Our blog site aims to release a new post every week, but we realise that it’s not always easy to keep up with them. So this week we’re going to take stock and do a quick recap of five blogs that you may have missed from the past year.

1. Exploring issues relating to housing and care provision for LGBTQ older people – As it’s currently Pride Month, this seemed appropriate. It provides an overview of a webinar organised by the Housing and Dementia Research Consortium where three presenters shared their views and experiences of some of the issues facing LGBTQ people with dementia and LGBTQ older people more widely. It was a well-attended and well-received webinar, so definitely worth another look.