The Centre for Primary Health & Social Care at London Metropolitan University organised a seminar titled Integrating Forum Theatre into Dementia Care Mapping (DCM)
The speakers were Alison Backhouse, Dr Ryan Arthur, Medah Ramchurn and Greg Ryan.
This was a scoping project that attempted to integrate a well-established dementia care training tool with a drama-based, empowering training technique in a local care home. Dementia care mapping is used in many care homes as a training tool. DCM has been met with concerns about implementation, it seemed that Forum theatre, that we had experimented with at university, could be integrated into the process and may improve training outcomes.
This was a complex collaboration between a local care home and 5 of its staff, and our team, including Public Health, Drama students, a Social work lecturer trained to use Forum theatre, a Learning development coordinator, and a Health and Social care lecturer. Forum theatre seemed to be a useful feedback option for DCM, but it did not alleviate the highlighted problems linked with implementation, such as it being time-consuming. Our project, however, revealed new perspectives about person-centred care for dementia patients.
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