practical living
practice. The third is how dementia progresses. And the fourth is
managing dementia in general practice.
Essentially, it’s a conversational format with discussions between
GPs, nurses, carers and people living with dementia. And it focuses
on challenges and outcomes. Dementia clinicians and experts
join the conversational piece and emphasise key information
and sharing current practice and research information. So,
essentially it provides some clear practical tools and strategies
which practitioners can apply to the development of their own
framework for identification, diagnosis and management of
patients within their practice. So, confidence and attitudes about dementia increased
significantly.
The participants that have already undertaken the modules
throughout this project phase and development phase have
a strong intention to apply the systematic framework to their
practices, which is obviously something we wanted to achieve.
They think the framework’s useful and beneficial.
Apart from that, they think it’s an acceptable and ethical
thing to do. A number of them said they’ve seen success in
investigating new patients for dementia, and reported increased
awareness and confidence as a result of the modules.
What feedback have you received from GPs and practice
nurses who have taken part? What are some of the key
takeaways they’ve identified? Minister Wyatt earmarked a potential national rollout.
What do you see for the future of the program?
We did do some evaluation of the resource and then made some
improvements to the resource after the evaluation. What came out
of that is that there was a significant increase in knowledge about
dementia after people completed the modules. The knowledge
score increased significantly for practice nurses and for GPs.
There was a heightened, increasing confidence in attitudes about
dementia after completing the modules.
We had a practice nurse that actually came and spoke to the
group at our recent media launch with the minister, and she
couldn’t speak more highly of the increased confidence and
knowledge and the information she received through the module.
Well, that’s a good question. Obviously, we’re hoping to roll it
out through various avenues. We’ve already made it available to
the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. We