Improving personalized care planning for people with dementia and carers

Lead Investigator: Dr Sarah Griffiths

Institution: University College London

Grant Type: Fellowships and Career Development Grants

Start date: January 2024

Duration: 36 months

Amount: £244,217.13

This project is supported by the Hamilton Neal Fund.

Project summary:

Everyone living with dementia should have a personalised care plan, informed by individual needs and care priorities. However, this rarely happens. Often, care plans are not personalised, and may not even involve the person living with dementia in the process of developing a care plan.

Dr Griffiths aims to understand how GPs and other members of the primary care team can work together to improve care planning. She will also develop a training and guidance toolkit to support personalized care planning conversations with people living with dementia. 

Project background:

NHS England advises that everyone living with dementia should have personalised care and support plan which is updated every year in an Annual Dementia Review. The plan should be developed through conversations with the person living with dementia and/or those who know them well. However, dementia reviews are inconsistent and can lack quality. 

NHS England also promotes a shift from GPs being the only healthcare professionals carrying out dementia reviews, towards sharing the task with the wider care team. This could include Social Prescribers, Dementia Advisors and Care Coordinators. The wider care team is an important part of dementia care, which can have a positive impact on quality of life. However, the wider care is not often used to develop Annual Dementia Reviews. The team can be poorly used, and the biggest barrier is not having enough guidance on how to facilitate personalized conversations in dementia.

Therefore, this presents an opportunity to join up the two types of care planning, which would lead to better conversations about people’s care needs, and how healthcare staff can work together to deliver better personalized care for people with dementia. 

What does this project involve?

Dr Sarah Griffiths will review existing challenges of delivering personalized dementia care and support. This will include reviewing published evidence, and conducting interviews with healthcare professionals, care staff, and people living with dementia to understand the challenges and successes of delivering personalized dementia care plans. 

Dr Griffiths will be able to understand what verbal and non-verbal communications work well, and what matters to people living with dementia and carers. This work will let Dr Griffiths develop and test a training toolkit, which could be used to train staff on how to have better personalized care planning conversations with people affected by dementia. 

How will this project help people with dementia?

By understanding how GPs and other members of the primary care team can work together to deliver better personalized care planning for people with dementia, Dr Griffiths hopes to address communication challenges and barriers to integrated care planning.

Producing and testing specific training toolkits for staff will enable more integrated and personalized care planning, which will improve quality of life for people living with dementia and their carers.