Dementia workstream update

The Dementia Friendly primary care initiative called ‘iSPACE’ was developed and put into practice by Oakley & Overton Partnership Practice, North Hampshire with a grant from the Accelerator Funds awarded by the Wessex Academic Health Science Network in 2013.

The evidence underpinning the principles of this initiative is the RCN Dementia survey of 2,184 professionals, patients and carers in 2011.  Out of this survey the SPACE initiative was developed, originally designed to be applied in hospital services, but adapted by Oakley for use in primary care and called ‘iSPACE’ (see published research section for evidence).

The Wessex AHSN also began a Quality Improvement Programme focusing on Dementia in early 2014.  As part of this programme of improvement projects a decision was made to evaluate the ‘iSPACE’ initiative to consider its value and potential for further spread throughout the Wessex region.

With consideration to the number of national campaigns, guidance and enhanced service incentives in dementia occurring simultaneously, it was agreed by the project team to conduct an initial survey of GPs in Wessex followed by collection of / review of a series of case studies before considering further expansion of the initiative.

The evaluation will use the Logic Framework and provide both quantitative and qualitative data to describe experiences, but will not be able to provide comparative data to show effectiveness compared with other models of service.

Evaluation of the Dementia Friendly GP surgery model continues with sign up from Ryde to be a comparator site with Oakley and Overton Partnership Surgery.  It is planned to evaluate the services in these two surgeries and to collect qualitative feedback from patients, their carers and staff and to collect some quantitative data on the outcomes of these changes.  The Wessex AHSN Centre for Implementation Science based at the University of Southampton has committed 2.5 days per week to this project.  It is planned to report on this work in November 2014 and if appropriate to start the roll out of this model from December 2014 to July 2015.

Syd and Hanna present iSpace research at the Dementia Conference Sept 2014