£80,000 funding for dementia work in South London

The South London Health Innovation and Education Cluster (HIEC) is celebrating after being awarded £80,000 by the Regional Innovation Fund to develop a dementia training centre in South London.  The successful funding bid was led by directors of SLaM's Mental Health of Older Adults Clinical Academic Group (MHOA CAG).

The HIEC is a collaboration of around 30 organisations and is one of 17 new Government funded networks nationwide.  The networks aims to deliver high-quality patient care through better trained clinicians and faster translation of research and innovation in to clinical practice. The major partner is King's Health Partners¹ - one of only five in the UK.  . Other members include all south London's primary care and mental health trusts, 17 NHS hospitals, London Ambulance Service and the local Health Protection Unit, as well as six universities, further education providers and social care teams.

The centre aims to offer a unique training experience to multi-agency professionals across the HIEC area by pulling together examples of good practice and disseminating them as widely as possible. Training will include presented courses and e-learning packages, with targets mapped against the National Dementia Strategy.

The South London HIEC has two strategic objectives on dementia; to increase the number of people who receive a good quality early diagnosis, and to reduce the number of people in care homes who are prescribed anti-psychotic drugs inappropriately. Clinicians, commissioners and social care providers already meet under the HIEC umbrella to work in these areas.

David Norman, Service Director, Mental Health of Older Adults Clinical Academic Group (MHOA CAG) at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM), led on the successful bid.  He commented; "There is great need for high quality education in best practice dementia care across South London. The new centre will provide high quality training and specialist service development skills to public and private sector organisations. Our mission is to spread good practice from throughout the HIEC across traditional borough and sector boundaries."

Professor Robert Howard, Academic Director, MHOA CAG and overall lead on the HIEC work on mental health, added; "We hope to develop a national reputation as the premier dementia training centre, offering a unique approach in terms of course content and flexibility of access. The success of this bid means that we can start providing training that will make a real difference to the quality of care provided to dementia sufferers."

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¹ King's Health Partners is a major collaboration between three of the countries most successful NHS Foundations Trusts - Guy's and St Thomas', King's College Hospital and South London and Maudsley, and one of the world's leading research universities, King's College, London.

Together, King's Health Partners forms an Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC) - one of only five in the UK.  The point of AHSC's is to break down barriers, and combine and focus first-class clinical and academic expertise to create world-leading improvements in healthcare.