2. Leadership and governance

No organisation can provide person-centred dementia care on their own.

Partners from across health and social care and from other regions in Wales and the Welsh Government will work together to:

• share learning
• set common goals
• work
• learn and develop together.

There will be ‘whole system’ leadership of the care and support of people living with dementia in your area.

Local partners will have co-produced a shared purpose, vision and beliefs statement for learning and development. It should focus on the value, independence and well-being of people with dementia.

You share information and involve staff (often called communication and engagement plans) in ways that bring the vision for learning and development in dementia care to life for everyone interested in it.

You and your partners build effective learning and development into commissioning, contracting and procurement arrangements.

You and your partners quality assure care and support to make sure it’s always strengths based, personalised, and supports well-being.

Your region works with other regions. People in the region know what needs to be done to provide core values-based care. You’ll be confident that every person with dementia and their families experiences the same quality core value-based care wherever they live in the region or elsewhere in Wales.

You will be building on core value-based care with skill-specific training that’s tailored for specific groups in the population.

Health and social care commissioners and service providers should be able to tell anyone they provide care for: “We are confident you will experience consistent core value-based care no matter who provides your care.”

Leadership: a whole system approach

The role of robust leadership is to support staff to set up evidence-based care for people living with dementia. It needs to be a whole-system approach, steered by the organisation’s leaders.

Workplace cultures should change by investing in clinical leaders or dementia specialists, and adopting practice development approaches that focus on processes, people and outcomes.

The Dementia Friendly Hospital Charter focuses on the RCN (2019) SPACE - VG principles for leaders and staff across health and social care.

• Staffing
• Partnership
• Assessment
• Care
• Environment
• Volunteering
• Governance

Effective high-quality training and education in dementia for all staff underpins the SPACE-VG principles.

• Nigel Hullah, the chair of the 3 Nations Dementia Working Group for Top Teams, has produced a range of resources and other guides about co-producing solutions with people living with dementia.
  
  There’s also a forum or group for professionals working in dementia. The 3 Nations Dementia Working Group offers support and advice, and there’s a network of people living with dementia and carers who offer support and advice on Twitter.

• The UK Network of Dementia Voices have a number of guides to help you involve people living with dementia in your work.

• Diverse Cymru’s Connecting with People has some useful resources, including a guide to help providers connect with people from diverse backgrounds and involve them in influencing and making decisions about services. There’s also a guide for health and social care workers about providing dementia care to people from a range of communities.

• Diverse Cymru’s Cultural Competency Toolkit can be used as part of any dementia learning and development planning process. It will help you meet the diverse cultural needs of people with dementia and their families in your area. They also have a guide on meeting the cultural and religious needs of people living with dementia.

• The All Wales Dementia Care Pathway. The 20 high level descriptions of standards set out what people think will make a positive difference to dementia care in Wales and can support local leaders. Its Workstream 5: Workforce Development and Measurement has a set of self-assessment questions that will help each workstream get ready, identify areas to focus on and make sure you have support in place to meet the main requirements of the dementia pathway standards.

Go to the next section: 3. Structure and planning.