Abstract
With our increasingly multicultural elderly in South West Sydney (SWS), the lack of a dementia screening tool that was culturally fair was a serious deficit. It became necessary to develop the tool. Following a series of focus groups a number of items were tested and the best were then amalgamated into a simple tool, the Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale (RUDAS). This was then validated in a further group in SWS. The RUDAS is currently undergoing further validation in Melbourne and Adelaide and has been adopted in New Zealand and used in India and Spain. This presentation will cover the initial development and validation and briefly touch on the latest studies involving the RUDAS.