Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment (Decision) in prison: A realist informed feasibility study and formative process evaluation

Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment in Prison
Background
• Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) affects how people remember and think.
• Dementia and MCI can stop people from doing everyday activities easily.
• MCI comes and goes, but still affects people’s lives.
• Once someone has Dementia, it does not go away.
• Over 1000 people living in prison in England and Wales have dementia/MCI.
• Many people living in prison are afraid to speak up and often don’t get the same help as everyone else.
• We want to make sure people in prison living with Dementia/MCI get the right help.
• People with dementia/MCI helped us to design a service to support people within prison called DECISION.

What does DECISION do?
• Trains staff in prison to help people with dementia/MCI
• Raises awareness about dementia/MCI.
• Supports staff to provide the best care.
• A staff member makes sure people with dementia/MCI are getting the right care.
• Makes sure everybody gets the same assessment and is followed-up afterwards.
Makes sure referrals are made to the right teams.

What do we want to know?
1. Whether and how DECISION can work in prison.
2. How we should find out whether DECISION improves the lives of people with dementia/MCI

What will we do?
Work Package 1
We will use these methods to see how well DECISION works and why:
1. 2. 3. 4. Interviews with staff and individuals with dementia/MCI
Questionnaires with people who complete the training
Observations of individuals with dementia/MCI
Use the information we collect to tweak DECISION

Work Package 2
1. 2. 3. Ask 40 individuals who receive DECISION to answer questions about how well their needs are met
Interviews with individuals about how they found answering the questions
Looking at the costs of DECISION

Work package 3
1. 2. Hold a workshop with staff and experts by experience
Write the plan for a larger study
How will we involve people?
• A member of the team is living with memory problems and has lived in prison.
• We have talked, and will keep talking, with people who live in prison with dementia/MCI.

How will we tell people about this research?
We will work with people who live with dementia to produce:
1. Scientific papers
2. Presentations at conferences
3. An article for a prison newspaper
4. A short, animated video

Glossary
Dementia: a permanent medical condition which affects people’s thinking and ability to do everyday activities.
Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI): a medical condition which affects people’s thinking and ability to do everyday
activities. It comes and goes but may turn into dementia.
DECISION: the name of the service we have designed. It stands for Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment in
Prison.