Today’s Margaret Butterworth Care Home Forum had speakers sharing their work on improving mealtimes for people living with dementia in care homes and initial findings from the Virtual International Care Homes Trials Archive (VICHTA). The speakers generated a lot of interest and 75 people attended the online webinar. The audience was a mix of care home practitioners, managers, and academics interested in care home and dementia research.

James Faraday, ARC Dementia Fellow from the Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, shared his work on improving mealtimes for people living with dementia. He discussed his research process, the benefits and challenges that come with carrying out ethnographic research in care homes, and of course the findings of the study. James developed a training intervention for care homes together with care home staff, family carers and other experts by experience. In his current project, he will test this training intervention.

Lisa Irvine from the University of Hertfordshire discussed the development of and initial findings from the Virtual International Care Homes Trials Archive (VICHTA), part of the larger DACHA study (Developing resources And minimum data set for Care Homes’ Adoption). The VICHTA study is a new collaboration with University of Glasgow, where data from completed trials/studies have been combined and pooled to allow new research questions to be answered. Lisa shared how the archive will work, the process for requesting pooled data, and examples of how focusing on ideas generated from care home staff and residents themselves can be included.

There was plenty of time for discussion and the speakers were asked both practical questions about implementing the knowledge in practice as well as more theoretical and research questions. One new OT in a care home said the presentations were “very interesting and relevant to my new role”. Many attendees mentioned how interesting the research presentations were and asked for the PowerPoint slides to bring to their care home teams.

Slides from both presentations are available on the event website.

The next Margaret Butterworth Care Home Forum will be in September, more details will follow soon.

This event report by Olivia Luijnenburg.