Near the end of a forum exploring collaborative, participatory approaches to changing views on dementia care — one that appreciates the gifts and strength of people living with dementia as much as anyone else’s — a professional told the audience how he’d changed through that one session.

“I thought I knew what I was doing,” he told the gathered crowd of caregivers, family members, researchers and people with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.

“I thought that I was actually helping people. Boy, did I have it wrong and from this day forward, I’m going to change.”

For a decade now, Dr. Sherry Dupuis, director of the Murray Alzheimer Research Education Program (MAREP), has looked at her research in dementia care from an “appreciative, participatory approach,” and this memory stands out in her mind as a sign of its value.

“That was a very powerful reminder to me that unless we have opportunities together to challenge our assumptions, we can’t change,” Sherry says.

Sherry is one of two principal investigators in an extensive research network called the Partnerships in Dementia Care Alliance (PiDC), and Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is at the root of the study.

It’s taking place on the ground at four Culture Change Coalition (CCC) sites in Southern Ontario: Bloomington Cove Specialty Care; St. Elizabeth Health Care, South West Community Care Access Centre and a number of other community-based support services in Huron County; The Village of Wentworth Heights; and Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care.

Relationship-centred care is a major focus of the project, which has been underway for about two years now, but is really just ramping up on the ground in all four CCC settings.

There all kinds of assumptions Sherry says have had to be unpacked in order for people to realize the possibilities in the new point of view this project considers, from assumptions about the appropriateness of relationships in dementia care, to the abilities of people living with dementia in general.

An appreciative, strengths-based approach honours the fact that relationships are valuable, and shows that people living with dementia are able to contribute to the conversation in very meaningful ways, Sherry says.

For more information on the work of Dr. Sherry Dupuis and MAREP, please visit http://marep.uwaterloo.ca/.

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