iSPACE is a number of actions designed to improve the patient experience through delivery of a set of improvements in care planning, communications and awareness of dementia for staff in primary care settings.
The AHSN has funded a project to make GP surgeries dementia friendly. This was piloted in Hampshire, implemented on the Isle of Wight and then evaluated by the Wessex AHSN Centre for Implementation Science at the University of Southampton. This project has shown good outcomes for patients and is now being spread across Wessex.
I – Identify a dementia champion,
S – Staff Training,
P – Partnership working with patients, carers, and the voluntary sector,
A – Assessment and oversight of use of anti psychotics
C – Care planning and use of tools such as ‘This is Me’,
E – ensure the environment supports people with dementia and other disabilities.
This work is now being spread across Wessex with 143 surgeries in the process of becoming dementia friendly. The programme is often carried out in conjunction with the Dementia Action Alliance and groups who wish to make their communities dementia friendly.
If you'd like to implement the iSPACE actions in your surgery, you can download the full toolkit from the Resources section on this page - click on the purple button named Access iSPACE Resources.
You may also like to watch our films showing how Oakley & Overton Partnership initiated iSPACE, and what the improvements have meant to patients and carers, which are available on the right-hand side of this page.
Lastly, below you can see how this project is spreading to GP surgeries in the Wessex region on this map:
You can also now view the special webinar, which helps explain how to implement iSPACE and what the AHSN's learning was from the project. This video is below and to the right of this page.
NB There is a minor erratum at the start of the talk. The three delivery models in Nottinghamshire relate to the spread of a dementia friendly toolkit developed during the iSPACE pilot in Derbyshire.
You may also like to watch our training films:
Film 1: What is dementia?
Film 2: Creating Dementia Friendly GP surgeries using iSPACE
Resources