Dementia Care Mapping (DCM) is a methodology developed at the University of Bradford, recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and already widely used in the National Health Service (NHS) and in care homes to help staff to apply their person-centred care training to their caring role.

DCM involves staff observing the experience of care from the point of view of people with dementia and then feeding this back to staff, who use this information to look at ways they can improve care. This process is carried out every four to six months so changes can be monitored and new improvements identified.

The aim of the EPIC trial was to provide definitive evidence about the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of  DCM in reducing distressing behaviours such as agitation in care home residents. As part of the study, researchers conducted semi-structured interviews were conducted with 83 participants, comprising care home managers, trained DCM users (mappers), expert external mappers, staff members, relatives, and residents, to evaluate barriers and facilitators to implementing DCM.

Recently, publishes results from this process evaluation highlights that implementing DCM is complex. According to the findings, barriers and facilitators to DCM implementation were found at the mapper level (e.g. motivation and confidence), the DCM intervention level (e.g. understanding of DCM) and the care home level (e.g. staffing issues, manager support). Further barriers caused by the burden of trial participation were also identified (e.g. additional paperwork). These findings highlight the need for greater consideration of potential barriers and facilitators in planning future studies and in practice could help improve implementation.

To read the complete paper please visit the following link: https://bmcgeriatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12877-019-1045-y (open access results)

For more information about DCM training courses run by The University of Bradford, please visit the following site: https://www.bradford.ac.uk/health/dementia/dementia-care-mapping/