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Dementia Services Collaborative
About the Collaborative...
Over recent years there has been an increasing awareness of the needs of people with dementia and their carers. Meeting these needs is one of the key priorities of the National Service Framework for Older People.Unfortunately in recent years there have also been times when services have failed to deliver high quality care for people with dementia. In some areas of dementia care, morale has been low, leading to difficulties in recruitment and retention of staff and resulting in poor quality services.
For these reasons frontline staff in the North East of England set about modernising dementia services. We wanted to ensure that people with dementia were well cared for physically, and also people's psychological, spiritual and social needs were respected.
But we didn't just want to change services - we wanted to change the way we worked too. The opportunity to increase motivation and enthusiasm amongst staff working with dementia services and to enable people to be directly involved in developing and improving these services was seen as an equally important driver. We felt a 'bottom-up' rather than 'top-down' approach was needed and therefore a Collaborative seemed the ideal solution.
The Dementia Services Collaborative was established in July 2002 and the project was to run for 22 months however it has proved to be so successfull it was extended untill the end of December 2005.Since 1st January 2006 the Dementia Services Collaborative Regional Project Coordinator has been working with the Older Peoples Lead to mainstream the Collaborative into the Older Peoples workstream of the Regional Developement Centre. This recognises that there should be no end point as a Collaborative it is not a project as such but ultimately about developing an improvement culture within and across organisations.
