This month’s dementia webinar focuses on dementia and care homes. Good care enables people to live well with dementia and an estimated 70% of people living in care homes have dementia).

More than 65 attendees came together from across the South East region to listen to speakers present on:

• Interfacing with care homes: Surrey and NH Hants describe their journey to providing dedicated care home pathway services and their model for good quality care
• Dementia champions in care homes: A look at how the Berkshire Integrated Care Home Support Team developed and supported care staff to become Dementia Champions
• Oral health and dementia: Why oral health is important and how we can deliver good oral health for people with dementia in care homes
• We Check dementia care: A toolkit and resource for care homes to identify and deliver high quality care

The associated slide pack can be downloaded here and a full recording of the webinar is below:

You can follow further dementia webinars in this series below:

Dementia imaging (October 2020)
A discussion about the subtlety in diagnosing the causes of cognitive decline, whether ruling out other potentially reversible diagnoses, or making a confirmed diagnosis of dementia, with classification of subtype. This is particularly challenging when availability of imaging is limited. A poll held during the webinar collected the opinions from the audience and forms part of the report. 

MAS South East Restore and Recovery (August 2020)
A showcase of some of the SE MAS services adaptions to Covid. Featuring use of remote consultations (use of phone & video) diagnostic tools, remote history taking and delivery of diagnosis, lessons learned and plans for the future.

Factors affecting patient outcome and experience (July 2020)
Dementia remains a diagnosis with significant impact with a need to balance the timeliness of diagnosis with patient experience and outcomes. Covid may become endemic and our adapted ways of working may become the new normal. A checklist of findings to aid recovery planning.

Interface between primary care and MAS (June 2020)
Wider system working and exploring the interface with primary care. Keeping people safe, infection control, high risk groups and social distancing are likely to result in a continued reduction in face-to-face contact. Discussion on maximising the opportunity to detect cognitive difficulty, rapidly assess this, and pass information on.

MAS service, activity and learning (May 2020)
COVID-19 has had a major impact on dementia services. This webinar sought MAS service views as a peer-support exercise to support recovery planning. The feedback from the discussion and survey can been seen in the report.