Learning to communicate with people with dementia: Exploring the impact of a simulation session for medical students (Innovative practice)

Abstract

There is a recognised need to improve undergraduate education within dementia care. UK medical schools provide dementia-specific teaching, but this has previously been found to focus more on student knowledge and skills rather than behaviours and attitudes and does not often involve the wider multidisciplinary team. A simulation day was established, based on communicating with a person with dementia in a number of scenarios. This article aims to identify if this method of teaching within dementia care is successful. It is a qualitative study and draws on data from postcourse questionnaire responses and field notes of the simulation day. The data offered rich insights into how the session allowed participants to be challenged and taken to their perceived thresholds of capability. It highlights that behaviours and skills can be learnt via simulation and leads to a transformative change in the language learners used, suggesting that learning may happen through threshold concepts.