Background: The Dementia Friendly primary care project, iSPACE, was put into practice as a pilot initiative in April 2014 by Dr Decker at Oakley & Overton Practice, with funds awarded by the Wessex Academic Health Science Network (AHSN). The evidence underpinning this initiative was the RCN Dementia survey of 2,184 professionals, patients and carers in 2011, from which the SPACE principle was developed for use in hospital care. Dr Decker adapted this for primary care and named it iSPACE, with the purpose of improving patient and carer experience, teamwork and clinical consultations.
Aim: The overall aim of the iSPACE pilot was to improve the patient experience for people with dementia and their carers.
What is iSPACE? iSPACE is a set of actions that improve the experience of people with dementia and their carers. It brings together a number of actions that have been part of other initiatives such as staff training, developing links with voluntary services, working in partnership with carers, reviewing coding, reviewing the environment and addressing future planning through tools such as "this is me".
Evaluation: The evaluation has found improvements to patient and carer experience, staff delivery of iSPACE and clinical consultations, with the caveat that this study was not able to control for the effects of other national schemes occurring simultaneously
In addition, the evaluation has identified encouraging signals in the following:
- good fit with current best practice
- low resource costs to implement
- positive potential for spread of practice across Wessex
Centre for Implementation Science, University of Southampton (2014) Endorsement: Dr Michele Legg of Tower House Surgery IOW recommends iSPACE. “This is a relatively inexpensive bundle of actions that makes a big difference to patients and their carers in managing what can be one of the most soul destroying illnesses we encounter.”
For further information about this project please contact Katherine Barbour, project manager at the Wessex AHSN [email protected]
These resources can be found on the Wessex AHSN website http://wires.wessexahsn.org.uk/news-and-events/news-ispace-resources/