A Collaborative Approach to Dementia Inclusion in Social Work Education: The Dementia Intensive.

Abstract

There are 5.8 million Americans with Alzheimer's disease and this number is rising. Social Work can play a key role. Yet, like other disciplines, the field is ill prepared for the growing number of individuals and family members who are impacted physically, emotionally and financially. Compounding the challenge, the number of social work students identifying interest in the field is low. This mixed methods concurrent study assessed the preliminary efficacy of a day-long education event among social work students from eight social work programs. Pre- post-training survey included: 1) dementia knowledge, assessed with the Dementia Knowledge Assessment Scale, and 2) negative attitudes towards dementia, assessed by asking students to identify three words that reflected their thoughts on dementia, which were later rated as positive, negative or neutral by three external raters. Bivariate analyses showed that dementia knowledge (mean difference= 9.9) and attitudes (10% lower) improved from pre- to post-training (p<0.05). Collaboration between social work programs can increase student access to strength-based dementia education. Such programs hold the potential of improving dementia capability within the field of Social Work.