Focus on Dementia reducing stress and distress improvement programme 

Working with hospital and care home teams (grade 3 and above) to improve outcomes for people living with dementia through person centred approaches in the prevention and support of stress and distress.

It is estimated that around 25% of people in acute hospitals and 62% care home residents have dementia. We know that people living with dementia often experience longer hospital stays, delays in leaving hospital and reduced independent living. Many people living with dementia will experience stress and distress and this can be exacerbated when in unfamiliar environments, which includes hospitals and care homes. Distress can also lead to increased safety issues, such as falls. Many people who do not have a diagnosis of dementia will also experience distress due to cognitive impairment, delirium or other factors.

This programme is a collaboration between Healthcare Improvement Scotland, the Care Inspectorate and NHS Education for Scotland and is working with a range of health and social care stakeholders including people with lived experience of dementia.

A Reducing Stress and Distress Self-Evaluation Tool has been developed which sets out what is expected from high quality, person-centred care for people living with dementia to reduce stress and distress. This tool can be used by teams in hospitals and care homes to self-assess their service against a set of quality criteria and to identify priority areas for improvement.

The programme launched in December 2024 and will run until the end of 2025. Participating hospital and care home teams will complete a 12-week programme and will then join our online collaborative to support ongoing learning:

• Initial 4 weeks will focus on self-evaluation to support teams to identify areas of good practice and improvement priorities
• 8 weeks of quality improvement support to support teams to design and test improvement ideas and capture evidence of impact
• Reducing stress and distress collaborative sessions held monthly for teams to access ongoing light touch support and continue to share learning following completion of the 12 week programme.

You can find out about the partcipating teams on the programme news page. 

We will capture evidence and learning from improvement activity and share this with our networks to support wider spread. We will do this through hosting a small number of webinars and publishing learning summaries.

Email us at his.focusondementia@nhs.scot if you have a question about the reducing stress and distress improvement programme or would like to speak to a member of the team.