Report: Caring for Someone With Dementia

Carers Trust Wales are please to launch the new report “Supporting Carers of People Living with Dementia”. This report has been developed as part of our project to increase the identification and support of older carers, in partnership with Age Cymru and funded by Welsh Government.

This report follows a series of roundtable sessions, hosted at both a national and regional level in Wales, and attended by a wide range of experts and professionals in the field of dementia and dementia care. Some organisations represented include NHS Wales, the Shaw Foundation, Swansea University, Bangor University, Shared Lives Plus, Social Care Wales, and Alzheimer’s Society Cymru.

The report highlights several pathways to improving support for older carers, which we will look to develop across the lifetime of the project, including:

• Establishing learning sessions for those working within the field of dementia and dementia care, so that new techniques and tools can be shared and adopted universally
• Creating a ‘carer profile’ template for carers, to be shared with organisations. This will ensure that carers have their personal situation known by professionals they work with, and will not have to continually explain their circumstances to new individuals
• Creating a ‘positive conversations’ resource for healthcare professionals, disseminating how to have positive conversations with carers, and including a glossary of medical terms associated with dementia that many carers may struggle to understand.

We hope that this report will be a useful tool in addressing the challenges facing carers of people living with dementia and presenting new pathways to support.