Living with Dementia:

Abstract

All too often, dementia remains an abstraction for students in the health professions. Although social work students focus on environmental and family influences, nursing and medical students usually encounter a strong educational focus on hospital care, which limits the opportunity to understand the full impact of a dementing illness on patient and family. An interdisciplinary, experiential course was designed to include an opportunity to spend time with dementia patients and their caregivers in non-medical settings. This course had two goals. The first was to allow students to witness first hand what it is like to live with dementia. The second goal of the course was to match students of different disciplines and provide opportunities for these students to experience an interdisciplinary approach to patient education.