Curriculum for Dementia Education (CfDE)
As part of its commitment to improve professional education in dementia care, HEDN has developed a Curriculum for Dementia Education (CDE). The curriculum is designed to guide Higher Education providers in the key areas for inclusion in courses related to dementia care, at both pre-registration and post-qualifying levels.
This project has gone through a number of stages including:
- Initial generation of key themes and content areas within the CDE, and publication of these in a discussion paper (Pulsford et al, 2003)
- Analysis of the content of dementia education in UK universities, to gauge its concordance with the developing CDE themes (Pulsford et al, 2007)
- Consultation exercises with people with dementia and carers’ representatives regarding the CDE, and mapping against existing education and training guidelines
- Consideration of creative approaches to delivering aspects of the CDE (Hope, Pulsford, Thompson, Capstick & Heyward 2007; Thompson , Capstick,
Heyward, Pulsford & Hope, 2007)
A full account of the development of the CDE has been published (Thompson, Hope & Pulsford, 2009).
Work is currently underway to refine the CDE through identifying specific learning outcomes for each section, and to relate these to different academic levels.