Research Project
Full description Professionally provided home care enables someone to carry on living in their own home, rather than needing to move into residential aged care. Unfortunately, over 70% of people receiving home care have significant hearing and vision problems that are frequently undetected or under corrected. Up to 80% are also living with cognitive impairment or dementia. Interactions between hearing, vision and cognitive impairments have a major effect on quality of life, functional ability and cost of care and increase likelihood of moving to residential aged care. Sensory impairments also impact on carers of people with dementia, increasing social isolation, depression, relationship stress and care burden. Sensory interventions may offer a practical and cost-effective way to reduce the impact of dementia, extend healthy active years of life and support people's ability to age in place. We aim to build on our successful approach to home-based support of hearing and vision needs developed with people with dementia and carers via a Europe-wide project. We will work with people with dementia, carers and hearing, vision and aged care providers to adapt this European approach to develop home-based interventions that deliver holistic and multidisciplinary hearing and vision care after diagnosis to improve quality of life for people living with dementia and their carers. The intervention will will be systematic, evidence-based and compatible with existing funding and service models for home care packages and provision of allied health hearing and vision care. The intervention will then be embedded and evaluated in real-world home care settings.