industry & policy
DTA has members based in New
South Wales, Western Australia, Victoria,
Queensland and Tasmania. Alzheimer’s
Australia will play a key role in delivering
Dementia Essentials, an international
vocational training program that provides
free training and education to more than
16,000 staff working directly with people
living with dementia.
Alzheimer’s Australia national chief
executive Maree McCabe says: “This unique
collaboration and national approach to
training will ensure that the next generation
of dementia training is based on the most
up-to-date, evidence-based best practice,
delivered in a co-ordinated, nationally
consistent way.”
McCabe says the training will be available
to a broad range of health and agedcare professionals, ensuring that the best
available knowledge is translated into best
practice on the ground.
The new programs commenced on
October 1; Aged Care Insite sits down
with Judd to discuss how the launch of
the new service will proceed and what
HammondCare hopes it will achieve.
ACI: What will the service entail? What
should providers expect?
SJ: Dementia Support Australia is the
consortium that’s rolling out a nationally
consistent provision of what has been
the Dementia Behaviour Management
Advisory Service. That’s a long, tonguetwisting thing, but [what it’s going to mean
is] giving residential aged-care providers,
community providers and the acute sector
timely, responsive, boots-on-the-ground
service to help them with people with
dementia whose ‘behaviours’ they’re
finding challenging to support.
We’re going to show up [and] be a
proactive advisory service where we can.
Coming in earlier, particularly with residential
aged care, to de-escalate, and to help make
transitions from hospitals to more effective
locations for [some people].
How did HammondCare’s involvement
come about? Why did you want to lead
this program?
We provided the service in New South
Wales, and have for the last three or four
years. We’ve learned a lot from that. We
learned how you can support people
where they are. We don’t want to be a
service that is just a phone line. Yes, there is
a phone number associated with us, but it’s
more important that our consultants, the
Dementia Support Australia consultants,
are out there on the ground, meeting
people. Particularly people in residential
aged care, but we’ll also be taking calls
from the community, and from community
care organisations as well.
We had