Nurses are under extreme pressures compounded by national shortages and high demand, leaving no time for non-mandatory training, e.g. dementia care. At the same time, 1 in 3 hospital patients have dementia, often experiencing distress and confusion that requires skilled, personalised care. Appropriate management of these patients dramatically improves outcomes for patients, family, and staff, and reduces hospital stays. The NHS employs over 700,000 nurses and despite various previous initiatives, very few nurses possess the knowledge and skills to communicate and support patients with dementia. For employers, rising dementia cases and associated nurse training requirements are a national emergency.
This project will develop a new training app for nurses, driven by contextual patient information. Nurses will enter situational information relating to a patient with dementia and be guided with bite-sized information and suggestions. ‘In the moment’ contextualised training for dementia at the point of care will bring learning into the daily nursing routine, enabling personalised care. Nurses will be able to train when and where they want and will have a personal digital record of their training as part of their career development.
The app will ultimately be driven by artificial intelligence to give continuously improving training and use contextual information to enable data driven patient-centric recommendations. Scienap have strong links to the NHS enabling them to co-design and test their app with both educators and learners in the sector. Scienap has wider ambitions to make dementia care training accessible for all, including social services and other paid and unpaid carers in the community.