Co-Design of a Platform Matching Care Preferences of People Living with Dementia and Care Workers
Funder: Alzheimer’s Society & NIHR – £110,000
Start Date: 01/09/24
End Date: 28/02/26
What is this project about?
The aim of this project is to improve dementia care in the home by designing a digital platform that:
- matches the preferences of people living with dementia, their family/friend supporters and care providers
- enables ‘live’, needs-informed rostering (the process of creating schedules for care workers and clients)
Why is this project needed?
Providing care for people living with dementia at home can be challenging due to high levels of stress, burnout, and frequent staff changes among domiciliary care workers. This affects the quality of care for everyone involved. Research shows that matching care worker skills and characteristics to the specific needs and preferences of people living with dementia and their families/friends can improve care. This kind of matching can be done well by care managers and team leaders of small teams. When it comes to larger domiciliary care providers, finding the best matches ‘live’ can be achieved better and faster using computational matching. While there already are some apps helping people find the most suitable care workers, and software packages to support rostering, none have (a) combined preference matching with rostering and (b) none have focussed on co-design with stakeholders as extensively as our study.
How will the project progress?
There are a number of steps that we need to complete to develop a prototype of the digital platform. Importantly, we wish for people living with dementia, their families/friends as well as domiciliary care workers and managers to have the largest say on what the digital platform content contains, and what the interface looks like. For the platform to work well, it has to be developed by the people who would be using it.
Who is working on the project?
The core team members are listed below. We will soon have research assistants and interns working on the project, as well as external software engineers. We will not be developing this new matching platform on our own. Co-design groups of people living with dementia, carers/supporters of people with dementia, frontline domiciliary care workers and domiciliary care managers will define what the platform does and what it looks like. We will also be supported by a project steering group, consisting of individuals from the above groups, as well as wider stakeholders.
Who funded the project?
This project has been funded by the Alzheimer’s Society and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).
Who can I contact for more information?
If you would like to get involved in the project or if you have any questions and comments, please contact Rasa Mikelyte on R.Mikelyte@kent.ac.uk or Chris Poyner on C.Poyner@bham.ac.uk