Developing best practice in social care and support for adults with concurrent sight loss and dementia within different housing settings

Introduction

Meeting the social care and support needs of people with concurrent dementia and sight loss presents complex challenges. However, the policy aspiration to enable a greater proportion of people with complex needs to live and die in their own homes requires the specific challenges of providing care and support in these settings for people with concurrent dementia and sight loss to be understood and addressed.

Previous research has highlighted a number of factors which limit the effective delivery of social care and support specifically for people with concurrent sight loss and dementia, not least that models of care need to respond to both conditions, rather than working in isolation.

This project addressed this gap by building evidence for developing practice guidance in social care and support for people with dementia and sight loss in a range of housing settings. The research drew on the experience of people living with dementia and sight loss, family members where present, and a range of service providers, commissioners and support planners to explore current practice in social care from a range of perspectives, and identified models of practice, areas where practice could be enhanced and improved, and areas where there is a divergence of evidence.