Mechanisms of action: how visual identifiers could support good care
| Mechanism | Quote |
| Enabling or supporting coordination and improvement at organisation level | [With] the alert system, the operations centre and patient flow, particularly the hospital at night team, could actually see where our patients with dementia were. And it’s part of the trust policy … in accordance with National Audit of Dementia recommendations – … trying to now reduce those transfers around the hospital. (Dementia lead, 001, Survey) |
| Signalling eligibility for dementia-specific interventions | Anybody who comes in to ED, who’s identified through the forget-me-not scheme, is immediately assessed by the meaningful activity service. (Executive nurse, 006, Site 2) When someone’s got dementia, they get a laminated [card] so if they’ve got four people in front [waiting for an x-ray], they go ‘actually I’ll take that one first’, because that person’s obviously got [dementia] and we’re gonna get them, fast-track them through a bit quicker. (Dementia lead, 07, Site 3) |
| Helping to prioritise resources at ward level | I mean like I’ve just picked up my handover, the first patient I see, I don’t have to read anything and I can see that he’s got dementia so even though I don’t know anything more … I’m just looking at my identifiers. And I can see that this patient is probably going to need quite a lot of assistance that day. (Senior nurse, 002, Site 1) |
| Providing quick reference cue to additional needs of patient | For these kind of people, we know that we have to … have more patience with them, to know about them, what they like, what they dislike. Because they can feel very lost, they don’t know us, they are in a very strange environment, with different people every day, so this will affect their behaviour and their eating, drinking. (Senior nurse, 03, Site 1) [A wristband] is just a simple thing, you know, and you put it on, and the world just takes a step back and thinks, ‘Oh, we might need to approach it differently. We might need to word things differently.’ […] It just makes everybody just a little bit kinder. (Daughter, 13) |