Dementia support with Admiral Nurses

Hywel Dda University Health Board, in partnership with Dementia UK, provide a specialist service for carers of people living with dementia who are experiencing difficulties as a result of their caring role.

The team covers Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire with a focus on delivering person–centred and relationship-centred dementia care.

The West Wales Admiral Nurse Service provides practical advice and emotional and psychological support from diagnosis to post-bereavement, helping people to learn coping strategies and come to terms with the diagnosis. The service can help carers to navigate health and social care systems; provide education on dementia, signpost carers to other services and support carers to develop coping strategies.

Admiral Nurses support people at difficult times in their dementia journey, including when the condition progresses, or when tough decisions need to be made, such as a transition into residential care.

Part of the role of an Admiral Nurse is to deliver specialist interventions to carers and one particular intervention we offer is the Strategies for relatives programme (START), this intervention aims to provide carers with coping strategies and has been proven to reduce depression and anxiety for family carers of people with dementia when measured at eight months and two years after they had received the intervention. We have delivered 106 individual START sessions either 1-1 or in a group setting.

One of the carers who recently attended a START group said this:

“The START programme made me feel very supported and cared about. The Admiral Nurses were kind and very helpful. They treated us with compassion and understanding. I cannot rate them and the START course highly enough. Meeting other carers was really helpful too. We got along really well and supported one another. It’s so important not to feel you are the only one caring for someone with dementia. It’s good to feel you are not alone and that is what the START programme did for me. Thank you.”

If you are a carer of someone living with dementia and would like to be referred to the service, please contact your health or social care professional who can make a referral for you.

More information about the charity Dementia UK can be found here: https://www.dementiauk.org/

Charlie Duhig
Admiral Nurse Clinical Lead.