Royal District Nursing Service Limited trading as Bolton Clarke in partnership with Flinders University has been awarded an ARIIA grant for their project ‘Enabling Choices’: a risk negotiation tool for frontline staff to collaborate with people living with dementia’.
The ‘Enabling Choices’ conversation tool is fit-for-purpose and is designed to balance a person with dementia’s choices around activities of daily living (ADLs) that are becoming a bit risky. Pilot work identified feasibility and acceptability of the co-designed tool for people with dementia, their carers and frontline community aged care workers. Uptake of tools into practice, however, is challenging, with valuable research potentially lost through inadequate planning for implementation.
This project takes the pilot work to the next level of implementation, focusing on the careful and comprehensive planning and outcome evaluation that is necessary for upscale across Bolton Clarke, Australia’s largest independent aged and community care provider.
The primary emphasis of this work is on evaluation of implementation outcomes, comparing various form and function of implementation strategies across four regions of Bolton Clarke At Home Support services. Person-level outcomes for staff, people with dementia and carers are collected as secondary measures.