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Mental Health and Dementia

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Our Mental Health and Dementia Plan

Our Plan consists of three priorities, People, Practice and Pathways.

People - Improving the skills knowledge and values required in our people to support individuals who have a mental health condition or dementia.

Practice - Ensuring that people receive best practice in the timely and appropriate care, support, advice or information for their mental health condition or dementia.

Partnerships - Service users are partners in all of our work and internal and external partnerships are consistently built and maintained.
 

Dementia

Dementia is set to be one of the 21st century’s biggest healthcare challenge. At the Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust, we are working towards improving the experience for people living with dementia who use our services, as well as considering the impact it will have on our workforce.

Our staff are so often in the frontline when it comes to helping people living with dementia.  We want to make sure that they are trained and informed about the condition so that they have a good understanding of how to best support patients, families and carers.

The Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust is now recognised as a Dementia Friendly Community by the Alzheimer’s Society which allows us to focus on improving inclusion and quality of life for people with dementia in a number of ways.

Resources we have developed in partnership with people living with dementia:

  • ‘A Guide to Communicating with People Living with Dementia’ has been developed for our range of staff and volunteers, and is based on what people living with dementia and their carers have told us.
  • People living with dementia tell us that calling 999 can be difficult and stressful, so we have developed an educational leaflet in partnership. Click to see 'What happens when you call 999'.
  • Watch our 'Dementia Voices' video, which includes first-hand accounts from people living with dementia about their experiences or expectations of our services.
  • Working in partnership with Alzheimer’s Disease International and ITN Productions to celebrate our work at an international level.  We formed part of a documentary series called ‘Hope in the Age of Dementia’. Access the series.

 


 

Our long term ambitions for mental health and dementia are aligned to our Integrated Medium Term Plan priorities. We aspire to:

  • See and treat more people in crisis without conveyance to A&Es
  • Develop alternatives to A&Es and to convey people in a timely manner to wherever they need to go
  • Have a confident, capable and well supported workforce who can offer crisis intervention in the most effective and efficient manner possible
  • To take up our full role in the mental health system in Wales by working consistently with our partners and to continuously improve our services