Caregiving and dementia/Projects/Establishment and development of a dementia care wiki

Overview
This project developed an open, online platform for sharing knowledge about key aspects of psycho-social care of people with dementia from a wide range of disciplines including nursing, psychology, architecture, interior design, exercise physiology and dietetics. Emphasis was placed on fostering the communication of new knowledge from the researcher to the practitioner by providing overviews and links to more information about each of the DTSC National Priority Area projects 2011-2013.

The project sought to:
 * 1) Provide a growing body of current information on many aspects of the care of people with dementia.
 * 2) Contribute to the establishment of the community of interest essential to all KT strategies by involving many practitioners in providing, reading, monitoring and, hopefully, using current information.
 * 3) Provide international access to the views of Australian practitioners

This project was inspired by a wiki page submitted as one of the 100+ entries in the NSW/ACT DTSC sponsored University of Canberra essay competition. It illustrates the quality, ease of use and attractiveness of this form of information dissemination. This project established a wiki containing evidence-based information on a wide variety of topics related to the care of people with dementia (e.g. environmental design, creative activities, psycho-social interventions, assistive technology).

Health-related wikis are emerging as sources of information, e.g. cancer, depression and anxiety, and broadly-based wikis like ageing well in the UK. However there is only one dementia wiki available online which holds general information on dementia and is aimed at supporting people with dementia and their carers.

This is an innovative project designed to address the need for information about caregiving and dementia that is:-
 * 1) Multi-disciplinary
 * 2) Easily accessed
 * 3) Able to be kept up to date
 * 4) Focused on the needs of practitioners
 * 5) Capable of providing feedback to researchers on the relevance of their work and on gaps in knowledge
 * 6) Capable of contributing to the development of a community of interest that will engage a wide variety of practitioners and researchers in sharing their views and information.
 * 7) Capable of serving the Special Needs Target Groups by providing easy access to specialist, current information.
 * 8) Capable of facilitating the engagement of aged and health care staff in regional, rural and remote areas in the knowledge transfer process.
 * 9) Openly licensed and openly editable

More information

 * Caregiving and dementia
 * Caregiving and dementia wiki project (dtsc.com.au)