Nageen Mustafa

Design, Delivery and Evaluation of Teaching by Service Users and Carers

Education influences individual health and social care professionals and the systems in which they work. We describe a postgraduate educational program that did this through involving service users and carers in designing and facilitating teaching programs. A module of teaching was designed and delivered in partnership with users and carers from older peoples mental health services to a multidisciplinary student group. Its evaluation employed written feedback and separate focus groups involving students and service user/carer teachers. Both groups highlighted the profound effect of the teaching, and the involvement of users and carers was a powerful experience for all involved.

Educating and Training the Workforce to Work with People with Dementia: Two Projects from the United Kingdom

Educating and training the dementia workforce is a global challenge, given the expected increasing number of people living with dementia across the world as the population ages. Two projects from the UK (one regionally and one locality based) investigated courses available to the workforce and mapped the content of identified courses against a locally developed dementia care pathway. The locality project included a survey of what percentage of staff time was spent with people living with dementia, and what percentage of staff caseloads were devoted to people living with dementia. There was a great variation in the extent of education and training available, with some stages of the dementia care pathway poorly addressed. An educational strategy for the dementia workforce in the UK might include four categories of education and training: basic dementia awareness, intermediate level, advanced level, and dementia awareness for managers. Staff requiring education and training might be divided into three groups: those employed to work specifically with people living with dementia and their families; those working with people who have other conditions but some of whom will have a coincidental dementia; those working with other conditions but in settings where a high proportion of their patients have a comorbid dementia. To improve workforce skills in dementia care will require actions across the whole of education and training for professionals and untrained workers who provide services to this group.

How the United Kingdom's Criminal Records Bureau can reduce the prevalence of elder abuse by improving recruitment decision‐making

Specifically, organisations in both the private and public care sectors will be examined. Incidents reported by the media surrounding the failures in recruitment procedures will be discussed. An evaluation of recruitment decision‐making will be carried out and details of the present study, which considers how recruitment decisions are being made at present by organisations in the National Health Service (NHS), social care (SC), higher education (HE), further education (FE) and care home (CH) sectors, will be reported. The first wave of data collection consisted of informal interviews carried out with a series of recruitment decision‐makers from these organisations. Results showed that a variation in recruitment decision‐making between organisations exists, and so the protection of vulnerable persons may be being put at risk.