Living alone with dementia

This project aims to improve understanding of the factors that influence the service decisions of people with dementia by understanding how the levels of cognitive decline impact on health preferences and care decisions.

Dementia is a progressive deterioration in cognitive function meaning peoples' planning and problem solving skills are affected and often result in their reliance of support from family and friends. For people with dementia living alone in the community, the absence of this type of support is problematic and causes earlier admission to residential care facilities than for their counterparts living with carers. We will develop an ethnographic decision tree model of service decisions that allows us to understand and predict how certain situations will influence service needs and decisions of the target group.

Working in partnership with Advocacy Tasmania we will begin by observing the decisions of people with dementia living alone. We will use this information to build a model of key criteria which will then be tested.

Group Leader & Contact Person

Dr Christine Stirling, Senior Research Fellow

Internal Collaborator

Professor Andrew Robinson, WDREC Co-Director

External Collaborators

Dr Toby Croft, Royal Hobart Hospital

Ms Hilary Brown, Advocacy Tasmania Inc

Mr Ken Hardaker, Advocacy Tasmania Inc