With funding support from SHRF and CIHR, the Rural Dementia Action Research (RaDAR) team has been working to design and evaluate integrated primary health care practices for dementia in rural and remote settings. In partnership with community-based rural primary health care providers, one innovation has been the development of rural, interdisciplinary team-based memory clinics to support diagnosis and ongoing care management for people with dementia and their caregivers in their home communities.
The rural, interdisciplinary-team clinic model is informed by best practices in primary health care for dementia and the RaDAR team’s specialist Rural and Remote Memory Clinic (RRMC) in Saskatoon, but has been tailored to fit the context of each primary health care team. These rural memory clinics provide diagnosis and support to patients with dementia in their own community, with their own local health-care providers, while the specialist team at the RRMC in Saskatoon is available for referral for patients with complex or atypical dementias.
The RaDAR team envisions that this team-based model will be adapted and adopted by other rural primary health care teams, and RaDAR created this video to highlight this research collaboration. To learn more about the research, or if you’re a rural primary health care team interested in developing a local memory clinic, please get in touch with Debra Morgan.