Overview
Currently, there are not many specialists in Ghana who are trained in the diagnosis and care of people with dementia. However, more and more people are being affected by dementia in Ghana. It is therefore important to find a way to train family doctors, who are often the first point of call for people exhibiting memory challenges and other symptoms of dementia. These family doctors are also readily accessible to people in the communities; hence their training will widely improve access to dementia diagnosis and care in Ghana.
Project Details
This project aims to help family practitioners working in primary health care facilities in Ghana learn more about dementia. The course will be delivered online to allow flexibility, easy access and give the potential to be reused. The project will start by gathering information on what would be useful to include in a dementia course locally. This will be done by obtaining the views of a sample of these family doctors, as well as talking to people with dementia and their caregivers to ensure our course covers areas that are important to them, especially in the unique cultural context of Ghana. The information gathered from the Ghanaian stakeholders will be superimposed on the PREPARED course—similarly used to train General Practitioners in Ireland—to create a six-part online course. There will be weekly modules covering different topics, with each module including a short video lecture, reading text, case studies and a brief assessment. We will start by testing the course with 50 doctors in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. We will survey the participants before and after the course to determine whether there their knowledge about dementia has improved, whether the course was easy to use and whether it would be useful for their practice. Feedback will be used to improve the pilot version of the course in future projects. Ultimately, we hope this project will generate a resource that can be used by family doctors across Ghana and scaled up to other Sub-Saharan African countries.
Members involved
Featured Collaborators
