Ambulances to be adapted to better service dementia patients
LOS ANGELES: There is pressure on all ambulance services to better serve the dementia community.
All ambulances could one day play music from the 1940s or have window coverings of scenic views under a bold idea to help some of our most vulnerable patients.
Several ambulance services in England have fitted their fleets with these features, as part of a “dementia-friendly” upgrading, and Victoria has taken interest.
Ambulance Victoria intensive care paramedic Lindsay Bent will visit Britain this year to investigate using them in Australia, after winning a prestigious Churchill Fellowship.
Mr Bent said paramedics treated patients with dementia “increasingly regularly”, and the experience of leaving home can be very disruptive.
“Moving them from that environment by two paramedics who they’ve never seen before … often it’s in the middle of the night, it’s cold and dark and the ambulance can be noisy,” he said.
“They can become confused, agitated, scared.”
He said this was not only a distressing experience for the patient, but could also harm their health and extend their hospital stay.
“They can move into a state of delirium,” he said. “The health service we take them to now spends two or three weeks treating their delirium on top of what they originally called us for.”
He said sometimes patients, in their distress, can also assault paramedics but he hopes his trip will give him a chance to explore strategies that can reduce this and ultimately, improve patient care.
He said England’s retrofitted ambulances include scenic pictures that double as distractions, and carers ask patients to spot items; special mitts that double as woollen “fidget” toys and USB devices to play music.
“If they’re born in the 1920s, you’d play music from the 1940s,” he said.
“Dementia patients often fiddle and some of them fiddle to the point they try to remove their patient safety harness.
“So they give them twiddle mitts, which have loose bits of wool to twiddle and play with.
“They’ve changed internal colours and lighting design.”
But he said the transformation went beyond appearance, and staff also received dementia training and used “about me” documents, which detail how a patient prefers to be treated and addressed.
Mr Bent said that given Australia’s ageing population, it was even important that ambulances found ways to improve dementia patient care.
“If Victoria were to adopt the changes, it would be an Australian first,” he said.
“There are a lot of people with dementia and we get called to them for various reasons. It’s an important topic, especially with more than 100 types of dementia, but no states in Australia have investigated it.”