A Curriculum for UK Dementia Education: Developed by the Higher Education for Dementia Network (HEDN)

As part of its commitment to improve professional education in dementia care, HEDN has developed a Curriculum for Dementia Education (CfDE). 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 CfDE, 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 CfDE themes (Pulsford et al, 2007) Consultation exercises with people with dementia and carers’ representatives regarding the CfDE, and mapping against existing education and training guidelines Consideration of creative approaches to delivering aspects of the CfDE (Hope, Pulsford, Thompson, Capstick & Heyward 2007; Thompson, Capstick, Heyward, Pulsford & Hope, 2007) A full account of the development of the CfDE has been published (Thompson, Hope & Pulsford, 2009). Recent work has involved refining the CfDE through identifying specific learning outcomes for each section, and to relate these to different academic levels.