ONLY a handful of care homes in East Lancashire are providing good quality care for dementia sufferers, according to an expert trainer.

Michelle Greenwood, who recently became one of the most qualified dementia care trainers in the country, has pointed to a lack of specialist staff and understanding of the condition.

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Her concerns came as a major review by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which examined 129 care homes and 20 hospitals in England, said there were ‘too many people at risk of poor care’, due to ‘unacceptable variations’ in the quality of services.

Michelle, who used to run the dementia unit at Birch Hall in Darwen, said: “To move a dementia patient from a home to the hospital, or back to a home, is traumatic enough, and the biggest problem is there’s no continuity of care.

“I would say there’s only a handful of homes here that are providing the best care. Many of the environments are not dementia friendly.”

Michelle said one indication of good practice is the provision of a ‘reminiscence room’, which includes objects from the 1950s and 60s to help residents feel more at home. She introduced this at Birch Hall and she is only aware of one similar facility is East Lancashire, at Favordale Home for Older People in Colne.

She added that many patients deteriorate in hospital, but the NHS has begun driving through some key improvements.

There were no East Lanca-shire care homes or hospitals included in the CQC review, although earlier this year the regulator found there was ‘little evidence of support’ for dementia patients within the emergency department at the Royal Blackburn Hospital.

However, it also praised the hospital for creating a specially designed dementia ward, C5, while a screening pathway had been adopted across the five hospitals run by East Lanc-ashire Hospitals NHS Trust A ‘Butterfly Scheme’, in which dementia patients are identified with a butterfly marker on their beds, also helped staff provide ‘sensitive, person-centred’ care.

Jeremy Hughes, chief executive at Alzheimer’s Society, said of the national report: “Carers have told us that their loved ones have gone for hours without food or water in hospital or that they were in pain but no one realised. Staff can also find communicating with people with dementia extremely challenging and wards and a new care home can be disorientating to navigate.”