People with Dementia

We are using person centred thinking tools to explore how we can make self directed support a reality for people with dementia.

Person centred thinking tools are a way to move away from traditional care, where services and professionals retain control to a situation where people and all those who support them are empowered.

Papers and Articles

Kenny's Story - Person centred thinking and people with Dementia

Kenny is 64-years-old and is one of the most welcoming people you could wish to meet. He has lived in a home which supports people with dementia for five years.

As a young man, Kenny was a professional football player for Blackpool FC. Aged 25, he went into the textile trade as salesman until retiring due to early onset dementia at 54-years-old. Kenny loved sport and played every sport going. His mum Ethel said: "if sport had been his exams, he would have been top of the tree in them all".

To read Kenny's story in full, please click here

Using Person Centred Thinking to Implement Dementia Care Mapping: a paper by Alison Morley, Diane Redburn, Wendy Jennison, Jackie Mascall, Jane Fryer, Helen Sanderson and Gill Bailey.

One size can never fit all. We normally hear that when people talk about clothing, but the same could be said for care and support. While councils are busily adopting tools and processes to personalise services, they must ensure that they way they use those tools makes their services more personal where it really counts - at the point that people experience them. Good quality plans, strategies and reconfigured services are all vitally important, but if someone's immediate carer isn't working in a truly person centred way, then none of the high level strategies make much difference - at least not to the person on the receiving end.
Hull City Council had been developing its workforce so staff had practical person-centred thinking skills and tools to help them deliver more personalised services. Some of those who undertook the training were also experienced in Dementia Care Mapping: a process that helps professionals observe life through the eyes of a person with dementia. They saw that the two approaches could be combined to provide rich, high quality information to enable people with an advanced dementia express themselves. This in turn could help the staff who support them deliver more personalised care.
Buckinghamshire County Council has been working with Bradford University since 2005 to train Dementia Care Mappers. Their person centred planning lead Jackie Mascall had started to explore using person centred thinking with people who have dementia through the Practicalities and Possibilities programme in 2008. Jackie worked with Dementia Care Mapper, Jane Fryer and the local mental health trust's clinical psychologist Jane Fossey to develop a training programme that enables care homes to achieve a more personalised approach when developing care plans, using person centred thinking tools. This course shows how the useful information gathered through Dementia Care Mapping can be translated into a meaningful One Page Profile to Action for the individual.
Gill Bailey, lead on person-centred thinking and older people at training and development consultancy Helen Sanderson Associates, delivered Person-centred thinking training in Hull and worked with people in both areas to connect and share what they were trying. This paper draws that learning together and demonstrates how person-centred thinking tools can enable Dementia Care Mapping to deliver significant change for people who need care and support, and the teams who deliver that support.

To read this paper see the downloads box on the left.

Blogs

Springhill Care group provides residential support to older people including nursing care, end of life care, care for people with dementia and day care. Cathy Dunn is Matron of Springhill House & Catherine Shawarby is the manager at Birch Green. They are exploring how person centred thinking tools can be embedded right across their services. Follow the progress of Springhill Care on their blog page.