Dementia Care Mapping ( DCMTM) is a set of observational tools that have been used in formal Dementia care settings such as hospital wards, care home settings and day care facilities in the UK since 1991.
It has been used both as an instrument for developing Person -centred care (PCC) practice, and as a tool in research. It developed from the pioneering work from the late Professor Tom Kitwood on Person Centred Care. In his final book, Dementia Reconsidered, Kitwood described DCM as, “a serious attempt to take the standpoint of the person with dementia, using a combination of empathy and observational skill” (p 4 .16).
DCM is both a tool and a process. The tool is the observations and the coding frames. This is the intensive in-depth ,real time observations over a number of hours of people with dementia living in formal care settings. The process is the use of DCM as a driver for development of person centred practice, including careful preparation of staff and management teams, feedback of the results of the map, action planning by the staff team on the basis of this feedback, the monitoring of progress over time, and then the cycle of remapping commences. During a DCM evaluation a trained observer ( a mapper) may focus on one person or track a small number of people with dementia ( participants) typically up to five. This occurs continuously over a representative time period.
We now have 3 trained mappers from University of Bradford within the Future Care Group who will be starting to carry out Dementia Care mapping in our homes.
DCM is recognised by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.
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