Developing Excellent Care for People Living with Dementia in Care Homes

The award-winning PEARL programme has been proven to dramatically increase the wellbeing of people with dementia living in care homes. This concise and accessible guide describes the key criteria of the programme, and explains how dementia care practitioners and managers can implement them in their own care homes to achieve excellence.

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The award-winning PEARL (Positively Enriching and enhancing Residents' Lives) programme was developed to enable care homes to move from providing good fundamental care to excellent person-centred dementia care. Trialled extensively by one of the UK's largest care providers, it has been proven to dramatically increase the quality of life of people with dementia living in care homes, significantly reducing the use of antipsychotics and the incidence of stress-related behaviours.

This concise and accessible guide, written by the Director of Dementia Care at the care provider which trialled and developed PEARL, describes the key criteria of the programme, and provides best practice guidelines for dementia care practitioners wishing to use the approach in their own care home. With an emphasis on the practical, achievable elements of the programme, and drawing on many useful examples, the author and contributors provide guidelines on, amongst many things, getting the fundamentals of person-centred care right; enabling decision-making; reducing stress-related behaviours; psychosocial treatments; safeguarding; supporting staff; and involving relatives.