How to help people in pain or distress
Advice on how to help people with dementia who are in pain or distress is now available in a new guide.
The guide, ‘How would I know? What can I do?’, has been published by the National Council for Palliative Care (NCPC) as part of the Prime Minister’s Dementia Challenge.
It offers a range of top tips to help carers and health and care professionals identify whether someone with dementia is in pain or distress, advice on what may be causing this and a range of possible solutions. It follows on from NCPC’s 2011 publication, ‘Difficult conversations’ for dementia, which provides advice on how to talk to people with dementia about their end of life wishes.
Simon Chapman, director of policy and parliamentary affairs at NCPC said: “When people with advanced dementia experience pain or distress they may behave in ways that people caring for them find difficult to cope with, and also find it hard to say what is troubling them. This is why it is so important to know how to spot signs of pain or distress and what can be done to help them.”
The national clinical director for dementia, Alistair Burns, said: “Too often pain or distress in people with dementia may be overlooked or viewed as an unavoidable part of their illness rather than something that can be alleviated. This excellent new guide from the National Council for Palliative Care will be incredibly helpful in helping people to better understand the realities of living with and caring for somebody with dementia.”
Download ‘How would I know? What can I do?’ from the NCPC website.
Dementia friendly hospitals
Fifty-five acute hospital trusts signed up to the Dementia Action Alliance’s (DAA) latest call to action to improve care for people with dementia.
The call to action ‘The Right Care: creating dementia friendly hospitals’, aimed to reduce readmission rates, prevent over 6,000 falls across the country and bring down the mortality rate of people with dementia in acute care.
The goal is for every hospital in England to commit to becoming dementia friendly by March 2013.
Jeremy Hughes, co-chair of the DAA and Alzheimer’s Society chief executive, said: “It is great that we have so many (hospitals) committed to improve the care of people with dementia. However we now need every hospital in England to sign up. There are scandalous variations in quality of dementia care in hospitals and many people with dementia have been receiving unsatisfactory care for too long.”
Purpose-built centre in Wales
A Swansea hospital now has a new facility to care for up to 60 people with dementia.
Cefn Coed Hospital now boasts Ysbryd y Coed, an £18.5 million purpose-built unit designed to create an ideal environment for people with dementia who need hospital care.
The facility has three wards with private en-suite rooms, some of which can be set up for couples, family or friends to share. Each single-sex ward has an enclosed courtyard garden, and the hospital also offers quiet rooms, therapeutic areas, seating areas for visitors and facilities for people to stay overnight.
Dementia a ‘key priority’
Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that the improvement of treatment and care of dementia is one of his four key priorities.
Jeremy Hunt wants to ‘radically improve treatment and care of dementia’ in the NHS by 2015.
In the comment piece on the ConservativeHome website, the MP said that being appointed as health secretary was the biggest privilege of his life.
He wrote: ‘For far too long, people with dementia and their carers have not received the care and support they deserve. With our ageing population that must change. More early diagnosis, better research and better support for carers are essential if the NHS is to offer decent, humane support in line with its founding values.’
The other priorities listed in his top four are:
- Improve the standard of care throughout the system.
- Bring the technology revolution to the NHS.
- Improve mortality rates for the big killer diseases to be the best in Europe.
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