Tuesday, 15 July 2014

Training health professionals to understand dementia

Many professions in the health service do not have any idea about Dementia or Nurological illness, and this can cause many problems to those with the illness.

This has been confirmed by many  people who live with the illness, and also struggle with things like eye problems. 

The main problem is that many dementia problems fluctuate, so an eye test one day will have different results to one done the next day, or perhaps an hour or so later.

Many if these problems are neurological, so if as I understand correctly, the brain is not picking up the correct signals from the eyes.

So I have to ask if these eye specialists understand these problems, as many people think they don't

I have blurred and double vision, which it seems is common in many dementia's, yet these specialists simply do not understand it, or may be choose not to listen.

On top of being costly when mistakes are made, it's also quite distressing to those concerned.

As a health problem it should be ingrained into their professional training, because like it or not dementia is a worldwide problem, and it's a problem which is going to get much worse over the years.

This should also be considered in hospitals, as many hospital professionals tend to ignore dementia and think that it's not an illness "if they" cannot see anything. 

So this training must be done in all medical fields, so that there is no excuse for this sort of treatment in the future.

We are now around 5 years into the national dementia strategy, and yet there are still many places which have not moved on, possibly because it was not enforced. 

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