Dementia HIT 2023-24

Piloting ways to improve dementia care

2023-24 saw the completion of pilot projects aiming to improve dementia care in the community and in care homes. These had originally been funded through the NHS Ageing Well programme from BNSSG Healthier Together, with funding extended for 13 of the pilots in the short-term.

These included projects to enhance culturally appropriate care for people living with dementia from Black and Asian communities and establishing a new dementia meeting centre in South Gloucestershire in the region, where people living with a dementia and their carers have received help adjusting to the changes that dementia brings.

The HIT also supported delivery of two community-based projects funded by NHS Charities Together.

Bristol’s Chinese Community Wellbeing Society offered group walking, meditation, gentle dance and traditional Chinese QiGong exercises, to support community members living with dementia. They also linked up with the Bladder and Bowel Confidence HIT to run continence health workshops, as a person with dementia is more at risk of incontinence.

After talking to with service users about ways to challenge stigma and improve understanding of dementia within the South Asian community, Dhek Bhal ran a singing programme, as this can help people with dementia develop and maintain relationships with others, and improve their wellbeing. The group wrote and recorded a song ‘I am human too’ at a recording studio.

Championing representation

HIT representatives from Bristol Black Carers, Chinese Community Wellbeing Society, Dhek Bhal and Alive presented on challenging assumptions about ethnicity and culture to more than 100 delegates at Bristol Health Partners conference in October 2023. This was a springboard to planning a wider dementia carers event – encompassing health, social care and voluntary sectors – in 2024-25.

Supporting system working

The HIT’s relaunched Dementia Providers Forum has gone from strength to strength. The end of year event in March saw providers of regional dementia services across health, social care and the VCSE sector gather to identify the opportunities, impacts and challenges of new developments for treatments in dementia, alongside the academics and clinicians presenting the evidence for new disease-modifying drugs. The aim is to come up with a proposal of recommendations to the Integrated Care Board about how to implement this in the system.

Supporting discharge from hospital

HIT partner organisation Alive has been working with the Bristol Royal Infirmary on a project to improve assessment of dementia patients’ discharge needs, as it can be challenging to engage with patients in a potentially disorientating hospital ward. Bristol and Weston Hospitals Charity has funded a garden area within the hospital grounds, where patients can be assessed by physiotherapists while they do gardening activities.

Funding enabled in 2023-24

Dementia HIT helped secure £23,000 in 2023-24 for projects to generate research evidence, improve outcomes and address health inequalities.