Helping Hand Aged Care in partnership with the University of Notre Dame has been awarded an ARIIA grant for their ‘Retro-fitted dementia-friendly environments and staff education as determinants of positive outcomes for people living with dementia in aged care’ project.
This project examines the outcomes of dementia-friendly environment implementation, together with tailored training of staff in the context of human scale living for people with dementia. The Royal Commission supported small home living and recommended the Government guide the design of residential aged care accommodation with associated guidelines scheduled to come into effect by 2025.
However, with little evidence for benefits to residents of small home living, this project presents an opportunity to explore whether benefits of small scale correlate to the built environment itself, or to a combination of factors, such as providing a human scale environment and dementia education to ensure best practice dementia care is delivered to consumers. Pragmatically, it is unlikely that traditional homes with large resident numbers will be easily or quickly able to mobilise to change the built environment within the same footprint, or pivot to a radically different care model.
Thus, there is a clear need for providers to look at alternate and innovative ways to meet best practice within existing large homes into the future. This project aims to meets this need by examining the environment and care in three aged care facilities which are of differing ages and designs.