Griffith University in partnership with Blue Care has been awarded an ARIIA grant for ‘The co-design and implementation of an online staff education program to enhance pain assessment in people with dementia’ project.
Up to 80% of people with dementia regularly experience pain. However, pain is often under-recognised and undertreated in this group, leading to reduced quality of life and increased healthcare costs. Assessment challenges include the reduced capacity of people with dementia to communicate their pain, limited staff knowledge in identifying pain indicators, poor attitudes towards pain and dementia, and inadequate guidance on using pain assessment tools. To address these challenges, we will collaborate with Blue Care to co-design and implement an online Staff Education program to Enhance PAIN assessment in people with dementia (SEE-PAIN).
This includes three steps:
(1) identifying evidence of best practices for pain assessment in dementia care,
(2) co-designing the SEE-PAIN program with people with dementia, family, multidisciplinary healthcare professionals, and experts in online education, and
(3) program implementation with healthcare professionals supporting people with dementia.
Implementation outcomes (program acceptability, adoption, satisfaction, feasibility), participant outcomes (knowledge, attitudes, self-efficacy), and clinical outcomes (practice changes in residents’ pain assessment and management) will be collected during the program implementation and at the 4-week follow-up. By co-designing and implementing evidence-based research findings, this program will increase aged care workforce capacity and reduce the silent suffering from under-recognised pain among people with dementia.