“You just can’t do that in dementia care”: Barriers to partnership working within dementia services for people from south Asian communities
Compared to the White British population, South Asian communities are more at risk of being affected by dementia. However, dementia care for people from South Asian communities in the UK is marked by a series of health inequalities. Diagnosis is more likely to occur at a later stage when the
patient is often more severely impaired or in crisis. Consequently, South Asians are less likely to receive NICE-recommended treatments, including medication for Alzheimer’s disease.
People from South Asian communities who are living with dementia are also less likely to access the dementia care pathway and when they do are more likely to evaluate NHS dementia services negatively. Many older South Asians rely on support from community groups whose
staff and volunteers are not dementia trained partly as a consequence of their poorer fluency in spoken or written English.
A series of initiatives have attempted to address these health inequalities. This includes education
campaigns to improve levels of awareness about dementia so that symptoms of dementia are recognised as an illness rather than as normal ageing. Increasingly dementia services are turning
to partnerships with locally rooted Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprises (VCFSEs) in order to compensate for service deficits including a lack of skilled interpreters and poor connections with the local community connections.
In a new study co-authored by experts in the field, including Jabeer Butt, CEO of the Foundation, it explores the constraints to effective partnership working which prevent dementia care from being delivered in an equitable way.
The report identified three constraints acting to prevent effective partnership working.
- The different meanings that statutory and VCFSE participants attach to challenges threatens their
ability to develop a shared understanding of the needs of communities. - A reluctance to explicitly address service deficiencies can mean that stereotypes remain unaddressed.
- While both parties lacked power to change the fundamentals of service delivery, power and resources were also unbalanced with VCSFE services being more reliant on the statutory sector.
Read the full paper here.
