The governments first national dementia strategy; ‘Living well with Dementia: A National Dementia Strategy’ is intended to introduce a structured universal framework for the awareness, training and associated care provision across the health and social care sectors.
The document makes stark reading, with the 700,000 people currently living with dementia set to double within our lifetime to 1.4 million and in doing so, costing the UK economy around £17 billion a year.
The strategy identifies some 17 key objectives, the most pertinent here being:
Objective 11: Living well with dementia in care homes
Improved quality of care for people with dementia in care homes by the development of explicit leadership for dementia within care homes, defining the care pathway there, the commissioning of specialist in-reach services from community mental health teams, and through inspection regimes.
Objective 13: An informed and effective workforce for people with dementia
Health and social care staff involved in the care of people who may have dementia to have the necessary skills to provide the best quality of care in the roles and settings where they work. To be achieved by effective basic training and continuous professional and vocational development in dementia.
Clearly, purchaser’s and commissioners will be expecting to see evidence of care providers ability and committment to delivering against these objective’s. Specifically, two areas are worthy of particular note:
- Home care: with two thirds of dementia sufferers living at home, specialist dementia teams are likely to be in high demand.
- Residential care: Similarly, it is estimated that some two thirds of people living in care homes will have dementia. Again, care staff will be required to receive specialist dementia training.
In response to these development’s, Care Academy has developed a level 2 Dementia course that not only meets the Skills for Care knowledge sets but has also been cross referenced against the recently released QCF dementia units.
Skills for Care knowledge sets for dementia can be found here: Skills for Care.
By mapping our Dementia course to the proposed QCF units, candidates can be totally confident about it’s accuracy and they will also be able to progress onto the full certificated qualification once details have been ratified by Skills for Care.
To find out more about Care Academy please call 0330 995 0840 or contact us via our online form.