As part of IRNDP’s aim to facilitate and support knowledge translation relating to the prevention or delay of cognitive decline and dementia, we were keen to understand the barriers and facilitators to dementia risk reduction in primary healthcare settings.
To do this we ran a survey and chose Australia as a country with a strong tradition of primary care and we focused on three key areas:
- What primary healthcare providers already knew about dementia risk reduction.
- Whether primary healthcare staff felt that further knowledge was required.
- Where there might be barriers for dementia risk reduction in primary healthcare.
What did we do?
Clinical primary care staff completed an online survey. To make sure we gained a good understanding of what people thought we included ‘tick-box’ questions and the option to write longer answers.
What did we find?
The results showed that Australian primary healthcare providers have good knowledge about the modifiable risk factors for dementia but that they face some barriers to working to reduce dementia risk.
Overall the primary healthcare providers who responded to our survey recommended increasing resources to help improve people’s awareness of dementia and the risk factors that are relevant to them.
Our full results are published in the Australian Journal of Primary Health and can be found here:
We acknowledge the support of: the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council NHMRC National Institute for Dementia Research – Dementia Centre for Research Collaboration; the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in cognitive heath, the School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Australia; the Department of General Practice, University of Melbourne, Australia; NICM Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University, Australia; Discipline of General Practice, University of Newcastle, Australia; and Neuroscience Research Australia.