Accelerating the Development, Testing, and Dissemination of Home-Based Dementia Care Interventions

Summary

A national consensus panel was convened with support from the BrightFocus Foundation to review and summarize the need to move toward home-based dementia care as a critical component of care services for people with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD) in the coming decades. Panel findings show the evidence for providing wholistic, individualized home-based dementia care for patient and caregivers benefits is robust and growing. However to support this shift in care delivery to home settings, several challenges must be tackled, including to improve research methods to better disseminate evidence into practice; improve opportunities for home-care financing; train an expanded dementia care workforce; and take advantage of technology applications for the home. The findings are being disseminated internationally to policy makers, clinicians, researchers, and aging services providers. In addition, they were presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in 2016 and are a pre-summit activity to inform the Advisory Counsel of the National Alzheimer Project Act (NAPA) plans for a Fall 2017 Research Summit on Care and Services for Persons with Dementia and their Caregivers.