Person-centred Dementia Care for Allied Health

This session will help you to understand that person-centred dementia care involves:

• Respecting the human rights of all people living with dementia, including their rights to dignity, liberty, privacy and to be treated in a humane way
• Engaging with the person as a unique individual taking into account their life experience, unique abilities, interests, culture, likes, dislikes and needs
• Taking the person's perspective and seeing the world through their eyes, including ensuring people living with dementia and their family carers are equal partners in decisions about their care
• Providing a supportive and enabling physical and social environment

Learning Objectives

By the end of this session you will be able to:

• Discuss the rights-based approach to valuing all people living with dementia
• Recognise that each person living with dementia is a unique individual with distinct social and cultural backgrounds and personal preferences and needs
• Empathise with the experience of living with dementia; seeing the person's experience through their eyes and use life story work and advance care planning to ensure their perspective is central to decisions about their care
• Describe how to ensure we meet the rights and needs of people living with dementia through interaction and relationships and an enabling physical environment

In this session, we will explore the rights and needs of individual people living with dementia; how needs change over time and are influenced by culture and background, the importance of taking the person's perspective and the variety of ways we can enable people to live well with dementia.

This session has been mapped to the Dementia Training Standards Framework [1] and is designed to support the Dementia Action Alliance Dementia Statements [2]