This interprofessional workshop will aim to foster critical thinking, professional growth and collaboration amongst multi-disciplinary clinicians working with people with dementia. It will be similar to the successful dementia workshop that runs yearly within the College of Medicine and Health in UCC for undregraduate healthcare students across 11 disciplines. This workshop won the President’s award for excellence in teaching in December 2024. There is significant input from our PPI representative, Ms Ann Twomey, from the Alzheimer’s Association of Ireland. Ann has contributed not only to the delivery of the workshop but also to the design of workshop content. The workshop will include presentations from medical experts in dementia care as well as healthcare disciplines working in dementia care before the smaller group work session. We have carefully designed professionally relevant, ethically challenging clinical scenarios in dementia care and these will be discussed in small group work, with multiple disciplines represented in each group.
The aim of this dementia workshop will be to improve the knowledge, understanding and confidence of health care clinicians working with people with dementia and their families. This will include an understanding of each discipline’s role in dementia care.
This workshop will build on the previous findings of my PhD (final year), which aims to investigate the current provisions of dementia education and develop and design the core elements of a physiotherapy dementia care curriculum. Using a nominal group technique, participants attending the workshop will be asked to rank what is most important in dementia education, as well as what way is dementia education best delivered. These findings will be disseminated as part of my overall research findings, at both national and international level.
It is hoped that there will be significant interest in this type of workshop, and the conference venue has capacity for 70 attendees.