Editorial: Innovative practice

There is increasing interest in developing dementia supportive communities worldwide. However, as the articles featuring in this issue of Innovative Practice illustrate, these principles need to be integrated across the whole of the health and care systems. How this is achieved will depend on a number of local factors. The first article by Annabel Chalk and Sean Page describes the development of Dementia RED (Respect Empathy Dignity), an example from North Wales based on the twin concepts of people living with dementia as citizens in their community and developing ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’ approaches to dementia supportive communities. As the authors explain, North Wales is a predominantly rural region and so strategies aimed at achieving dementia friendly communities need to take account of this. For example, one of the developments they describe involves a road show in which members of the multi disciplinary team undertaking outreach visits to two different localities. The article shares interesting parallels with the account of developments in rural Ontario reported by Wiersma and Denton (2016). As Mills and colleagues (2014) have reported, the Department of Health in England has introduced financial incentives through the Dementia CQUIN to improve the identification of people with possible dementia in acute hospital settings. However, for this policy to be effective, it requires the involvement of junior doctors who are largely responsible for undertaking the initial assessments of people admitted to acute hospitals. In the second article, Ian Wilkinson and colleagues describe the process of establishing a team of ‘dementia champions’ in a district general hospital in London. The doctors who volunteered to undertake this role had a number of motivations for taking part, including personal experience of family member with dementia and wanting to share the enthusiasm of their peers who were already involved. Although being a dementia champion involved additional work, those who were involved found it both professionally and personally rewarding. The final article describes the development of a Living Well with Dementia (LivDem) peer support group for people affected by dementia in a primary care setting. Although some people with dementia access per support groups through memory clinics, only a proportion of people with dementia with dementia are seen by memory clinics (Hodge and Hailey, 2015). Therefore, in order not to exclude people from a potentially helpful intervention, peer support groups need to be accessible to people through their general practitioner or

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