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New funding for Dementia research within ARC Greater Manchester from NIHR in collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Society


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New funding for Dementia research within ARC Greater Manchester from NIHR in collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Society

ARC Greater Manchester is offering three career development awards for dementia research, as part of a national NIHR initiative to support promising early career researchers in dementia and to build up their number and skills across the NIHR family.

 

The ARC funding, provided by NIHR in collaboration with Alzheimer’s Society, is supporting a cohort of post-doctoral health and care researchers toward independence, developing their skills to establish their own research projects, programmes and ultimately groups.

 

Prof. John Keady, Professor of Older Peoples Mental Health at the University of Manchester and Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, said:

 

“It is a great honour to be part of this NIHR Applied Research Collaborations and Alzheimer’s Society initiative aimed at strengthening post-doctoral health and care research in dementia. Our specific Fellowship will span health and social care and look to build a lasting legacy in creative practices that values and promotes the contribution of people living with dementia in Greater Manchester and beyond.”

 

We are offering career development awards for the following projects:

 

  • Project 1: Everyday aesthetics and the intersection of arts and health. This fellowship project will use a participatory approach to develop, deliver, and evaluate an individually tailored, multi-arts social intervention with people with dementia living at home. With its ‘at-home,’ community focus, this project will provide new forms of sensory and embodied knowledge and understanding and will look to measure the arts-informed engagement at multiple time-points across the trajectory of the social intervention.

 

  • Project 2: Digital technologies for falls prevention for people with dementia. The Keep On Keep Up (KOKU) digital exercise programme supports older people to engage with simple, effective, evidence-based falls prevention exercises. KOKU is currently being modified for people with dementia and has been successfully tested with four care providers to enable people living at home with regular support visits to remain independent. This fellowship project will build on this work with intervention modification and a feasibility RCT.

 

  • Project 3: Dementia and palliative/end-of-life care. This study will build on on-going work by the EMBED-Care study team by exploring the potential for more integrated models of end-of-life care and knowledge exchange between hospices, health and care services and local authorities within Greater Manchester. This will comprise: i) a systematic review of research on integrated models of end-of-life care; ii) a mapping exercise to explore different types of integrated models of; and iii) qualitative interviews with key stakeholders in Greater Manchester.

 

Prof. Chris Todd, Professor of Primary Care and Community Health at The University of Manchester, Director of the NIHR Older People and Frailty Policy Research Unit, and our ARC-GM Lead for Healthy Ageing, said:

 

“I am delighted that we are hosting these Fellowships. They will help us achieve our goal of enabling people living with dementia to live longer, healthier, more fulfilling and socially connected lives in safe environments.  They will also help us to train the future research leaders in this important and all too often overlooked area”.

 

Dr Emma Vardy, Consultant Geriatrician at The Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust, Honorary Senior Lecturer at The University of Manchester and our ARC-GM Deputy Lead for Healthy Ageing, said:

 

“People with dementia were particularly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic including the effects of isolation, deconditioning and hence increased risks of falls. Falls prevention has been identified as a priority for the health and social care system in Greater Manchester and so we are particularly pleased that one of the fellowships will focus on using digital technologies to prevent falls in people with dementia, ensuring that people with dementia will not miss out on potential benefits that these technologies may offer”.

 

Information about all the awards available across the ARCs is available on the ARC Wessex website.

 

Published 12th August 2022

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