Overview
As we prepare for escalating cases of dementia across the globe, there is an urgent need to effectively prepare our healthcare workforce. Most healthcare students learn about the cognitive symptoms, disease mechanisms and medicines used for dementia. What is often missing is the human perspective of living with dementia, and the impact of dementia on the individual, their family, and their community. Achieving experiential learning like this can be challenging, but the recent explosion of digital technologies offers a potential solution to capture and convey the lived experience of dementia in digital formats, such as video, audio, photos and music. Digital storytelling has emerged as a high impact teaching and learning tool, presenting authentic, personal narratives of another person's experience directly to students in their education setting.
Project Details
The objective of this project is to apply digital storytelling approaches to dementia education in the generation of a collection of high quality, high impact and flexible learning resources that take an interprofessional approach to help students see the person, and not just the dementia. In depth, empathy driven interview approaches will be used to help people living with dementia, and their carers, to share their lived experience of dementia. More structured interviews with a range of healthcare providers and community members will explore how to offer support and care for the person living with dementia and their carers. The collection of videos will be included within the curriculum of a healthcare degree program and tested for their ability to build knowledge, skills, interprofessional perspectives and empathy in the higher education setting. Next, the digital stories will be shared as open education resources across the higher education sector.
This project has the potential to reach thousands of healthcare students, boosting understanding and awareness of the lived experience of dementia and the importance of working in interprofessional teams. Over time, more students will benefit from these freely available, evaluated learning resources. This is a flexible, accessible, and scalable educative approach to drive change in healthcare practitioner knowledge and skills thereby enhancing care and quality of life for individuals and families affected by dementia.
Members involved
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