Dementia Care Mapping

What is Dementia Mapping?

Monitoring and questioning the way we care for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia is an important part of delivering the very highest standards of specialist dementia care.

One way to ensure we challenge what we do is through Dementia Care Mapping (DCM), a process internationally recognised for promoting a holistic approach to improving life for each individual because it evaluates the quality of the care being provided from the perspective of the person with dementia.

It’s based on close observation. Staff who are trained in DCM observe a group of residents over several hours, recording at five minute intervals every detail about their care, about what each individual does and how engaged he or she is with their environment.  They also record when a person shows negative, neutral or positive emotions, such as frustration or joy.

Dementia Care Mapping is valuable for two key reasons, most importantly because it reveals the level of satisfaction each resident has with their living experience, each person’s emotional well-being and the variety of their experiences.  It helps us understand how we might support each resident to achieve a higher level of engagement with their surroundings, a more positive mood and a greater variety of activity. 

It might prompt us to consider how residents who walk in the garden in the morning could be supported to collect flowers for the dining table or how we might maximize the level of comfort for a resident with dementia who is some times too cold or too warm because she does not action her own needs.

This detailed information helps with in-house training and staff development, enabling each member of the care and support teams to reflect on their own experiences, the effect they have on each resident’s well being, how they can enhance their team work and better develop their interventions with people living with dementia.