Our call to health and care professionals in dementia care: Educate yourself about dementia rehabilitation
October 14th was Allied Health Professions Day. This movement started in the UK, but it's now an international celebration of the role that professionals such as occupational therapists, speech pathologists, physiotherapists and many others play in global health. Some blog writers for Dementia Alliance International have already written about how allied health professionals have helped them. For example, check out these posts by Daniel Van Gent, Emily Ong and Dave Carpenter. However, many people living with dementia across the world can miss out on opportunities to access rehabilitation, or may experience difficulties with finding allied health professionals who know about dementia.
To address these issues, we have created introductory training about dementia rehabilitation for everyone involved in dementia care. We worked with people with dementia, care partners, healthcare professionals and policymakers in Australia to identify what people needed to know. We structured the content around the World Health Organisation’s Rehabilitation 2030 packages and the latest research, so there is something in there for everyone, whatever your discipline or role in dementia care. The course is launching today and you can access it right here.
Why did we create this free, online, self-paced education course? Our research found that lack of knowledge is a huge barrier to accessing dementia rehabilitation, and feeds into the other barriers we identified, such as lack of pathways, funding, disempowerment of people with dementia and their families, and most importantly, stigma. We know from the World Alzheimer’s Report 2024 that the baseline level of dementia knowledge amongst many healthcare professionals can be quite low across the world, and this can lead to the common myth that people living with dementia cannot benefit from rehabilitation.
Why do these misconceptions happen? Rehabilitation is commonly thought of as something that happens after a significant medical event, like stroke, or a fractured hip. But rehabilitation is defined by the World Health Organisation as “a set of interventions aimed at optimising functioning and reducing disability in individuals with health conditions in interaction with their environment”. However, many health and medical professionals may have only encountered rehabilitation in the more narrow context of restoring lost function, and so may not know that rehabilitation is simply focused on goals that are important and meaningful to the person. That means people with progressive conditions causing disability, like dementia, can benefit from rehabilitation to achieve their goals, as many others have written about.
Some health and medical professionals may also be less aware of what certain allied health professions do, and how they can support people living with dementia to remain independent for longer. For example, some people think occupational therapists just do home modifications or provide assistive technology. They may not know that occupational therapists can perform the environmental assessments that are so important for people with dementia, or deliver cognitive rehabilitation. Other people may think speech pathologists only check people’s swallowing, or work with kids. They may not know speech pathologists can provide rehabilitation for communication difficulties in dementia, including training family and care partners. I could go on!
There are lots of ways allied health professionals can help people living with dementia, and more people need to hear the words “dementia” and “rehabilitation” side by side. At a recent geriatric medicine conference in Australia, I spoke about dementia rehabilitation. A geriatrician put their hand up and asked me to give some “real examples”, as if I had made this up! Later, a trainee geriatrician came up to me and asked me to explain to them how dementia rehabilitation was possible when the baseline level of function is shifting. I used the example of low vision rehabilitation to convince them that the term ‘rehabilitation’ is still applicable to progressive conditions. We don’t suddenly withdraw all support because somebody’s eyesight has gotten worse, so why should people with dementia be denied access to allied health professionals because they will have more difficulties over time?
Dementia rehabilitation is not a fairytale! There are highly motivated and experienced allied health professionals out there doing it “in the real world”. These conversations show me that we still have more to do, to change the narrative around allied health among different groups involved in dementia care. We need more people who know about dementia rehabilitation, and can refer to, or offer it. This way, everyone living with dementia can ask for and get the rehabilitation they need to stay independent and able to keep doing what matters to them, for as long as possible.
So our call to action for all health and medical professionals involved in dementia care is this: Educate yourself about dementia rehabilitation. Because people living with dementia and their families are doing the same. Thanks to this year’s World Alzheimer’s Report, we hope that dementia rehabilitation will no longer be the best-kept secret in person-centred dementia care. More people will come to you asking about dementia rehabilitation, and this course will help you understand what it is, how it can help, and who can provide it. Maybe it’s you!
Click here to view the course!
About the Author
Marianne Coleman is an orthoptist (eyecare professional) and dementia researcher at the National Centre for Healthy Ageing (NCHA), a partnership between Monash University and Peninsula Health. Marianne is part of a research team focused on the right to rehabilitation for everyone living with dementia. The project was led by Prof Michele Callisaya based at Monash University and the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at University of Tasmania. For more information about the project, please visit the project website. You can also watch a short video about the project.
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